


Faith in Fast Cars

by goshemily



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/M, M/M, Punk Rock, Road Trip, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-30
Updated: 2012-07-30
Packaged: 2017-11-11 01:56:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goshemily/pseuds/goshemily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about Warped Tour is that it eats you alive.  It eats you alive and if you’re very, very lucky, it never spits you back out.</p><p>Brad went to his first Warped Tour when he was fifteen, unsure and itching for something. He came home with three new albums and gravel in his knees. Nate’s been going longer, East Coast so some different bands and some different crowds but always the same like this: you give your blood and Warped Tour gives it back.</p><p>This is Bravo Two’s first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to [fiddleyoumust](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fiddleyoumust), [harborshore](http://archiveofourown.org/users/harborshore), [liseuse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/liseuse), and [miss_begonia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_begonia) for hand-holding and encouraging and betaing. The title is from the song of the same name by The Format. There are some notes at the end of Chapter 4, mostly about places mentioned in the story. I listened to a lot of music while I wrote this, and some of that's included in mixes as Chapter 5. 
> 
> **Warning** : Early in the story, toward the end of Part 1, a guy at Warped tries to grope a girl in the pit. If you are concerned this will trigger you, you might skip the section about San Diego.

The thing about Warped Tour is that it eats you alive. It eats you alive and if you’re very, very lucky, it never spits you back out.

Brad went to his first Warped Tour when he was fifteen, unsure and itching for something. He came home with three new albums and gravel in his knees. Nate’s been going longer, East Coast so some different bands and some different crowds but always the same like this: you give your blood and Warped Tour gives it back.

This is Bravo Two’s first time. 

*

Brad’s phone vibrates on the counter, the only movement in the bookstore besides the whisper of customers’ turned pages. Rainy days are good for Moe’s and good for Brad. No frivolous tourists, and Brad can shelve and read as he pleases.

_MEETING AT NATION’S! NEWS1!_ Ray tells him.

_What news?_

_whatever PIE_

Pie is good. Pie is always good. The pie at Nation’s Giant Hamburgers is superior.

_I will consent to meet you after work._

Brad goes back to sorting used Miltons. There’s the usual glut of end-of-semester un- or over-marked copies of _Paradise Lost_ and _Aereopagitica_ ; maybe Nate wants one. Overthrowing the king is likewise good.

His fingers skitter self-aware over new poetry stock. He is a little in love with Anna Ahkmatova. Zeal should be clear-eyed. _And there is a river beyond my window – How deep, nobody knows_ , he reads.

In the aftermath of the rain Brad crosses Telegraph, most famous street in the East Bay and gateway to campus and the world for students. It’s hard to catch the usual smell of pot and doughnuts, and the sidewalk vendors who spend sunny days hawking political ideologies and bumper sticker slogans have stayed home. Berkeley feels wide open now. If Brad climbed two blocks up the hill he’d have a view across the bay to San Francisco and the horizon.

Inside Rasputin ( _the Bay Area’s largest independent music retailer, keep’n the Bay Area bump’n since 1971!_ ) Ray’s at the counter flirting with a cute girl. He always gives a student discount to anyone buying Loretta Lynn or Avril Lavigne. This girl’s got both. Brad grins at her.

“Alright,” Ray looks obviously at the name on her credit card, “ _Marissa_ , you are a hot lady with excellent taste and I gave you a discount, but remember your student ID next time. Hey,” he hollers as she leaves laughing, “you’re not a freshman, are you?”

“Ready?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ray comes out from behind the counter. As they walk out, “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” becomes “You Belong With Me” on the store speakers.

Brad raises an eyebrow at Ray. “The Dead Kennedys and Taylor Swift?”

“Whatever,” Ray says. “This place needed a new mix.”

They walk down University Avenue away from the campus, and Brad does not try to guess what's coming. He’s happy with Bay Area gigs. If he can do this well, if Bravo Two can be the best for the kids who come out for them here, then he’s doing his job. But Nate wants more. They’ve all stopped trying to figure out where he’ll try to land them next. If he isn’t bleeding onstage, he’s not giving enough.

Walt and Nate are sitting in a window at Nation’s with Mike. Nate stands out monochrome in dark tattoos and a black shirt against the yellow wall. He’s chewing his lip and tugging absently at his spacers. Brad shakes his head.

“What’re we celebrating?” Ray plops down next to Mike and steals a bite of Walt’s Boston cream pie.

“ _Are_ we celebrating?” Brad snags a neighboring chair and pulls it over, sits precise.

“I am assured that we are,” Nate says, a smile at Mike setting off the hollows under his eyes. He’s got berry pie, but he hasn’t eaten any of it. He looks around at them all. “Gentlemen. We’re going on Warped Tour.”

Ray says “Fuck. _Fuck_ ,” and his eyes get big. Walt apparently already knows. Brad considers this. 

Nate looks a little self-conscious, disconcerted, rubs a thumb at the blue waves on his wrist. “Guys, this is good.” He glances at Brad.

Brad starts to ask “Do you want this,” hands carefully non-committal on the sticky table, but there’s a cough behind him.

Mike’s mouth twitches. “Hi John,” he says gravely. “Q-Tip.”

Nate turns, only pleasure on his face. “Here for the pie?” he asks.

John ducks his head and elbows Q-Tip, who is all teenaged pretend nonchalance. “Hey guys. Hey Nate. We were going by, you know, thought we might get some pie, get down with the locals, and we saw you.”

“Hi.” Nate does not laugh. Brad notes that it’s a struggle.

“What’s up, man?” John asks, so adolescent and trying for cool that Brad wants to pat him on the head and take him for a nature hike. John and Q-Tip came up to the merch table together at Gilman a couple of months ago, Xs thick and proud on the back of their hands and nudging each other to buy t-shirts and an EP. “It’s my _punk name_ ,” Q-Tip had said to them breathlessly for an introduction, and after that Nate refused to call him anything else.

That’s what Brad likes about this town: it will usually take you on your own terms.

“Shit, homes,” and there’s Ray, finally processed it, voice high-pitched, “ _we’re going on Warped Tour_.”

John strangles over three sentences at once. Brad counts them. Q-Tip bobs in place. “Screwby, dude!”

“We have a band too!” John manages to get out. “Well, I mean we will! We just started it! I mean –”

“ _Shut up_!” Q-Tip is not as quiet as he thinks he is.

“That’s great,” and now Walt’s encouraging them, “Maybe we’ll get to play with you guys sometime.” 

This is too much for them, and they smile pretty manically at everyone – especially Nate – and Q-Tip remembers a “Congratulations!” as he hustles John to a table across the room.

Nate looks around a bit helplessly. “I don’t know why they do that.”

Brad leans forward, intense. “It’s because they’re so grateful to you for saving them with punk rock.”

“Oh fuck you,” Nate says, but there’s an edge there, less joking than he should be, and Brad sits back, off balance. Mike takes over.

“Like I told Nate, I’ve known Kevin Lyman awhile. I sent him your last EP, told him you’re managing yourselves and he should give you a try, and I finally heard back. I know this is short notice, tour starts in L.A. in a couple of weeks, but – ”

“We’ll take it!” Walt is so eager, so fucking ready to get away from selling overpriced copper pots to the faux authentic small-minded to-the-manor-born neurotic bourgeoisie cruising the Fourth Street Sur la Table. Walt’s ready for a break from the long commute across the bay and through the city to SF State. Brad doesn’t blame him. But.

Brad looks at Nate, who’s now staring at his own knuckles.

“What about our jobs?” Brad asks carefully.

Nate shakes his head. “This is more important.”

Brad treads very softly. “Okay. I know I can take a leave. But what about your volunteering?”

“I can do this.” Nate looks up and light catches his lipring. “Let me worry about that. I’ll get someone to cover.”

“You could always ask _them_ ,” Ray says, waving a fork at Q-Tip and John, who try desperately not to get caught staring.

“They’d do anything for you,” Walt adds.

Ray wants to know why Nate hasn’t exploited that shit yet and it all devolves pretty quickly into 'your mom' jokes. Brad watches Nate, who looks out the window.

The first time Brad saw Nate was at a barbeque, Mike’s backyard six years ago full of strays and beer, such a fucking cliché in faded Levi’s and an inoffensive Ramones shirt. He wore aggression with his skin and held his cup eighteen and defiant. In profile Brad marked him for another poser. When Nate turned, Brad saw his shaved scalp, realized his hair was an unspiked mohawk. Brad lifted his drink to Nate, warrior to warrior.

The second time Brad saw Nate was at a Dropkick Murphys show at The Warfield, downtown in the city so the show was big and corporate and the sidewalk smelled like piss. Brad likes loud Boston Irish punk as much as anyone, and the Murphys say what they mean and they back it up, but he wasn’t in it, was watching the pit for anyone who needed help out. Nate vaulted over the railing from the upper part of the floor. Brad ducked and Nate went past, crowd-surfing toward the stage with his mohawk spiked and green, true believer. 

By the time Brad got Nate drunk on his twenty-first birthday, shimmying to Thee Parkside’s jukebox, most squalid and hometown of punk hangouts, Nate’s hair was even and respectable. He wanted to be as useful as possible at Swords to Plowshares, a volunteer able to go in front of cameras to answer policy questions. Now he has a buzzcut, militant purpose and military intent.

Nate turns to him. “We can do this.” Mike looks Brad over judiciously.

Brad knows they can. He will follow anywhere Nate leads.

*

The night before they leave for L.A., they have one last show at Gilman, the second opener before White Man’s Burden and Tomatoes.

When they walk in, Nate salutes the “Sweet Children” on the beam above them, same as always. The room is like a giant post-apocalyptic barn, walls black and orange and green and murals, fantastic. He knows there’s probably new graffiti in the bathrooms since last week, but this feels finite. When they get onstage, most of the faces below look familiar.

“This one is for the ghost of Tom Joad,” Nate says, and screams along with Brad’s guitar. “Throw yourself upon the gears!” Fists in the air, the kids sing along, all fire in the belly and fear in the heart. “When they think you’re in a corner, throw yourself upon the gears!”

A girl climbs up beside Ray, quick grin, and launches herself into her friends’ waiting arms, right under the “NO STAGEDIVING” sign. She’s not the last. Q-Tip goes twice.

The set is hard and fast, thirty minutes for nine songs. They play a cover of “Don’t Fence Me In” and then Rebecca comes up and leads the clapping on “Tell It to the Marines,” hands over her head and leaning into Nate. He takes harmony for her gladly. It’s the respite before “We Must March,” the closing that Nate gives his all to always, livewire and third rail dangerous, exhortation. “Do you hear me?” he sings high and scorching over the bass, doubled over with the microphone in his hand. He passes it down to the kids in front for the staccato chorus, “ _Do you hear me_?” yelled by the jumping crowd. He stands for a minute looking at them with hands empty and mouth closed. His white shirt sticks to his skin. Waiting under hot lights isn’t enough.

Nate backs up and runs the three steps to the edge of the stage, jumps to be caught. He sings the ending held by Gilman, mic stretched out to him by a boy with blue hair. Afterward he’s set down thrumming, hugged and high-fived by everyone within reach. “Thank you Berkeley!” Walt shouts behind him. “We’ll see you at Warped!” There’s a ragged cheer.

* 

In the early morning Nate runs up through campus one last time, the only hot week of summer all eucalyptus smell and relaxed students ambling with coffee, Strawberry Creek inviting until you remember it has to be diluted three times just to show up on the pH scale. Nate runs past the “grade A fucking obvious homosexual” – thanks, Ray – statue of two football players, gift of the class of 1898, nods at them out of habit. He passes Sproul Plaza.

This is home. This is _The Iliad_ in Greek and Get Out the Vote campaigns and collective action, t-shirts that read “Fock Stanfurd” worn with pride, marches that go nowhere, and seven years ago a grin for his green hair as a girl with pink slid into a seat next to him in PoliSci 1. “Rebecca Naomi Jones,” she said, hand and striped armwarmer stretched out.

Last night after the show they sat on the curb drinking. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” he asked. The air smelled like hot pavement. They’d already divided up the pressings of their new split, half the records to go with Bravo Two on Warped and half to go with Tomatoes to Europe to open for Spinerette.

“Get real,” Rebecca said. “Nate, Spinerette! _Brody Dalle_! She _rocks_!”

“I know,” Nate said, crooked smile. “Good luck, Rebel Girl.”

“Good luck, Jesus of Suburbia,” she said back, and they clinked bottles.

Nate climbs the hill past the bell tower, circles the over-funded business school to drop down Bancroft toward the bay. They’ll make it. They’ll make it, and maybe they’ll get signed, stop funding their own EPs and living paycheck to paycheck and he’ll get to stop selling lumber in the yawning acres of Urban Ore, stop tending bar at the Starry Plough, put his time where it matters more. He’s gotten John and Q-Tip to take his place at the library program, made it no further than “literacy is a tool in the class war” before they were ready to volunteer.

Leaving Swords to Plowshares was harder. He clenches fists as he runs. If they can do this, if they can reach more kids, if he can make the kids listen, he can talk to them about infrastructure at home and peace abroad, immigrants’ rights and veterans’ benefits.

He jerks his head, eyes closed against the sound of Brad’s laugh rattling around his skull.

“People who can’t kill will always be subject to those who can,” Brad said when Nate started volunteering there. He’d still gotten up every morning with Nate, made him a cup of coffee for the BART ride, station always crowded enough for Nate to sneak it on the train.

Brad believes in this too. Nate knows it. He knows it in his gut like the euphoria of moving into a four-person apartment with the world before them, he knows it like the sound of his band hollering for him with his mother and sisters flown in from Baltimore at his graduation, he knows it like the frustration of not doing enough. Nate wants to dance on the ribcage of this anger, bare bones and make the world bleed.

He turns right on Oxford, heads down University. The maps already packed in the glove compartment center him. The van’s always been a piece of shit, but Brad and Ray worked on it all yesterday before the show. The trailer’s hitched. When Nate stops in the driveway Brad’s leaning against the garage door, arms crossed. “You ready?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

They stop at Nabolom to get cinnamon twists for the road. “Eat your fruit!” Mike yells after them from the doorway, wiping flour on his apron. “Scurvy ain’t pretty!”

The only thing sacrosanct is the opening song: like always, every journey starts with “The Guns of Brixton,” rolling down Ashby toward the highway and yelling “WHEN THEY KICK OUT YOUR FRONT DOOR, HOW YOU GONNA COME?” Sometimes they’ll switch to Operation Ivy or Destiny’s Child after that. Sometimes, they jiggle the wonky CD back to the beginning of _London Calling_ , listen to it three or four times straight through. Ray complained once, bored, “Driver picks the music!” twitching and strung-out on the road to a show in Portland.

Walt had shrugged. “Respect your betters,” he said.

It’s pretty hard to argue with the necessity of Joe Strummer, especially not when Nate has an _engines stop running_ tattoo wound around his left arm. It’s mostly dumb, he thinks now, looking at the thick black letters. But he was seventeen when he got it, and besides, you never get over The Clash. The sleeve of Bravo Two’s first 7”, beneath a crappy picture of them that Ray’s sister took at a house show, warns _the wheat is growing thin_.

*

They trace the artery of California, follow the 5 back down the way Ray and Brad came up eight years ago when they ran away from the desert to cold water like a metaphor. They take it easy, revel in every rest-stop and every In-N-Out. “It’s the state food,” Nate says. “It’s our patriotic duty.”

Brad munches subpar french fries and clicks his tongue stud against his teeth. It’s a companionable silence. They’re wedged in the backseat, as far from Ray’s Animal Style burger as possible. It’s pretty fucking unevolved, the way Ray eats that shit. 

Walt’s taking a turn to drive, counting all the _Why is California a dustbowl? Call Nancy Pelosi now!_ conspiracy theory signs stuck in fields at the edge of the highway. “That’s hella whack” is all he says.

Walt gets to say “hella” legitimately, Northern California farmboy born and raised, white nectarines packed along for the road. Brad doesn’t begrudge him his slang. Brad is all largesse.

“Do you remember the year Joan Jett did Warped?” Ray asks, leaning over to put a new mix in, trying not to transfer sauce from his fingers to the stereo.

“Fuck _yeah_ I do,” says Walt. “Also, we went together.”

Brad looks out the window, thinks about being fifteen and punching the air for the city lights on the horizon. The inland empire was good to him, adoptive loving parents and siblings, education valued and Shabbat dinners and the upper middle class American dream. There was no challenge.

Pranks at his first high school were a challenge. Then military school was a challenge. Ray, told by the administration to remove his plugs on the first day of class, was a challenge. To celebrate graduation, Ray stretched up a size. Brad got his tattoo finished. They headed north for adventure. Brad doesn’t regret the possible histories he left behind.

This fucking band. Brad grins, looks around at his men. Walt’s still counting signs, entranced by the weirdness of this state. Ray’s pushing his industrial back and forth in his ear (“Ray, that’s fucking disgusting,” Brad says, and gets the finger in return), and Nate’s calling Baptista to make sure he’ll remember to come by and water Nate’s cacti once a week. Nate keeps trying to grow plants, determined to have a green thumb, and they keep dying. The apartment is full of tiny pots of spikes. This fucking band.

The East Bay Express reviewed _Where the Watermelons Grow_ , their second EP, as sounding like “if Against Me! got in a knifefight with Rise Against, emceed by Joe Strummer, after everybody warmed up by listening to AC/DC and going to a Baptist revival meeting.” That’s the most pretentious description Brad’s ever read, so it’s kind of infuriating that he likes it. Yeah, he’s okay with Bravo Two sounding like a fight.

Brad settles into his seat, content, and waits for the smog.

Warped isn’t really in L.A., of course; it’s off in Pomona. They play “San Dimas High School Football Rules” in honor of the neighborhood. The song still sounds like being fifteen and clutching a discman under the covers at night, and it takes them to the hum of non-action on the fairgrounds where everything starts tomorrow. Right now the parking lot looks like a demented wagon train, all the trucks and buses circled around a bonfire.

Poke leaves the rest of White Man’s Burden at the fire and brings Brad a beer. They lean against Bravo Two’s van and look up at where the stars should be. “I heard,” Poke says, “that Ray ate four Animal Style burgers on the way down.”

“You were misinformed,” Brad says. “That whiskey tango reject only managed three.”

It’s a long night. Lilley films everything for a tour video diary, shows Bravo Two around the bus that White Man’s Burden is sharing with Great Justice & Much Hanging. It’s a good bus, and the bands didn’t have to pay to fix it up. Their label took care of everything.

“It’s nice,” Brad tells Poke. “I’m happy for you.”

“Whatever, man,” Poke says. “You know you should have one too.”

*

Nate walks the perimeter of the parking lot. It’s still early, and almost everyone is asleep. Walt’s curled up all pale legs and basketball shorts in the back of the van on a foam camping mattress. Ray’s sacked out in someone’s bus. Brad’s finding out their set time.

Eight stages. One hundred and twenty bands. Forty five cities. Nate breathes deeply. They can do this.

“Uh, excuse me? Hello?” He turns and sees a twitchy guy with scene facial hair and a notebook. “Hi, I’m Evan Wright? And I’m doing a piece?” Nate nods encouragingly. “I’m trying to interview some of the smaller bands on Warped this year. And you don’t look familiar?”

Nate doesn’t recognize the byline but he can feel his stance shifting, spine straightening and feet firm. “Hi,” he says, and smiles widely. “I’m Nate Fick.” He holds out his hand. If we can reach more kids – “Who are you writing for?”

“Um, this is for a bigger piece in _Rolling Stone_?”

By the time Nate’s got Evan back to the van, they’ve covered how Nate got into punk (“sometimes you just need something more”), Bravo Two’s status (“unsigned, but who knows what could happen,” with a bashful shrug to mask the kickdrum in Nate’s chest), and why Nate loves Warped Tour (“this is where it happens”). Nate feels hollow. Evan looks charmed.

“We’re on at noon,” Brad says from against the van, eating a nectarine and watching them walk up. He’s leaning again. He always leans.

Nate looks him square in the face and says, “Brad, this is Evan Wright. He’s a reporter from _Rolling Stone_ , and he’s writing about Warped.”

Brad smiles slow and easy. “Well. We know about that.” He pushes off the van and stands tall to shake Evan’s hand, their double act, Brad hating that they have to sell the band but always willing to bullshit the industry.

“So, uh,” and Evan’s all big eyes, looks out of place like what the fuck is this his first assignment, “How’d you get into this?”

Brad keeps eye contact, dominance and sincerity, and Nate looks away. “What else is there?”

“So it means a lot?”

“Homes,” and here’s Ray, rolling around the side of the van with aviators firmly in place and a hangover, “it means _everything_. Brad practices three hours a day by himself, fuck if I know why, it’s like aural masturbation, he’s already the best guitarist here.”

“And you are…?”

“Ray Person, man. Bass. Walt’s the pretty princess ASLEEP IN THE BACK OF THE VAN” – Ray kicks the bumper for emphasis – “and he drums. He’s got rhythm. Not something you’d expect, looking at him, but I figure all those chemicals must have done something to him.”

“Chemicals?”

Ray’s conspiratorial, leans close. “He’s a farmer, you know. They use a lot of them.”

“And Brad, you practice a lot?”

“He’s making it up to the rest of us,” Ray says, slinging an arm around Evan’s neck and extending a hand to sweep across the horizon. “See, Reporter, Brad had the world at his feet, safe middle class kid, good parents, Hebrew school on the weekends, and since he made the choice to get down and dirty with the rest of us punks, he has to prove himself.”

Evan’s delighted, smells good copy, sets off with Ray around the fairgrounds to see the sights. Nate and Brad let Walt sleep; they start hauling gear. They find the merch tent they’re sharing with White Man’s Burden, courtesy partly of a split 7” but mostly of Poke’s charity. Nate doesn’t look at the stack of their Fruit of the Loom shirts beside Poke’s brighter, better American Apparel ones.

The fairground gates open at 11:00. Bravo Two is one of the first bands playing, and probably to an empty crowd. They’re on the Kevin Says Stage with a lot of bands too small to have Wikipedia pages. Bravo Two has one; their problem has always been keeping Ray in check, not getting themselves online. One of Ray’s favorite pastimes is adding to the “Rumors About the Secret Past of Guitarist Bradley Colbert” section on their own website, otherwise sedate: some photographs, some songs, a PayPal account for their merch.

Such as it is. Nate weighs three self-released EPs and a handful of 7” records against everything he wants to say, and Bravo Two is lacking.

*

Brad looks out from the stage. There is no barrier. They have half an hour to convince the kids milling around the grounds in striped tanktops and fake Ray Bans to join the twenty standing in front of him, taking pictures and impatient. Ray’s talking to one of them, and Walt’s trying to fix his pedal. Brad looks over at Nate. Nate is always good at a show. They have each other’s back.

“Alright,” Walt says.

“Hey guys,” Nate calls. “We’re Bravo Two, and we want to thank you for getting here early and listening.” He nods at Brad.

They start with “Wage Slaves,” and Brad’s solo makes its backbone. Brad leans into the notes and loves this. He looks down at the kids. There are a couple of girls dancing right at the front, singing along and completely here. He loves them. The reporter’s hanging around near the back. Brad’s okay with him too. Keeping them here, keeping them listening: this is Brad’s job.

By the time the set is over, thirty minutes like a firefight, Nate is drenched in sweat. Brad watches him lift the hem of his shirt to wipe his face. They have an extra dozen in the crowd now. The reporter stuck around the whole time. Brad shakes a couple of hands and tosses his pick to an emo kid. He can afford to be magnanimous.

They drag their shit back to the van, and Nate pulls off his shirt. Reporter’s followed them and is cataloging Nate’s tattoos, his throwback to old sailors. Nate’s got swallows and anchors, everything dark blue and black and gray. There’s a three-masted ship on his right bicep with the most delicate shading Brad’s ever seen. He’s also got The Clash and Dylan Thomas and “a time to gather stones together,” Ecclesiastes. Brad knows them all like the back of his own hand. He stacks drums inside the trailer and listens to Nate tell the story of the _No Surrender_ on his back. It’s Gothic, inked thick and dark and arcing over his wingbones. Nate snuck out of the house to get it when he was sixteen. He paid for it with hard-earned money and a fake ID. It took his mom about three hours to figure out he did it. It was his first tattoo.

“You got anything?” Reporter asks Brad next. “Person showed me his.”

Brad smiles wide enough for Reporter to see the silver bar through his tongue. He turns around and lifts his shirt, holds it up a minute. He knows his piece is impressive.

“Nice,” Reporter says. They talk a little longer, send him off with good wishes.

Ray and Walt are manning the merch tent today. Brad and Nate walk around the Fairplex and poke each other, or try to. Nate’s an evasive motherfucker. They dodge PETA and some of the other non-profit booths, but they sign a bunch of letters for Amnesty International. They skip catering in favor of bands. Burn the Flag is here. Bryan Fucking Patterson. Holy shit.

Brad stands on the sidelines and watches Nate jump in for The Briggs, scream “just want the pleasure of being on my knees” with his head back and his hair catching light. Brad doesn’t sing but he chants along under his breath, beer in one hand and Nate’s shirt in the other. _It grows back_. _It’s only bone_.

Burn the Flag has the closing slot on the main stage, gets the extra ten minutes for their set. It’s still light out, but the smog gives them a red sunset. “Sailors delight,” Bryan Patterson tells the crowd, and the bass drops for “Anchors Away.”

Nate got his shirt back from Brad after The Briggs; now he pulls it off again, gone, jeans slung low and face incandescent. Brad grabs his hand and they push their way in before the end of the third bar, everyone grinning and alive, pulled by the bass, yes, yes. Fucking _yes_. Nate trips on someone’s foot, overexcited, flushed and mouth open and Brad’s hand slides against the sweat at the small of his back when he tries to catch him. Nate almost goes down but he clambers up somebody’s shoulder, alight.

They’re off.

*

Mosh pits smell awful. They can be dangerous. They’re vital.

Brad loves the pit because he can be. When he was fifteen and gangly and falling over everything, trying not to accidentally hurt his sister or stand taller than his father, the pit was revelation. There are rules (cardinal: don’t be an asshole), but it’s the closest he gets to whole. His body isn’t his enemy; given the right crowd, he can stand as tall as he wants. He can shove without worrying about force.

The pit can also be exhausting. Tall guys are expected to watch out for other people, and it’s their default job to help smaller kids who want to get out. And sometimes even here Brad feels like a menace. One time at a Black Lips show he accidentally knocked into a tiny girl in ballet flats standing on the edge, and felt off-balance for the rest of the night. (Ray asked her what kind of hipster wore ballet flats to the Black Lips. She told him to fuck off, and then they made out.) But mostly this is the one place Brad fits in his skin.

For Nate, the pit is revolution and it’s bloody and it’s sexy and he dives in to be hurt. He needs the chaos. It’s not about letting his body do as it will, it’s about being done to, being not in control. Sometimes it’s just fun, just pushing in time to the bass because that’s what you do at a show. But sometimes he gives himself up. It’s conscious, and it’s terrifying, and the next day he catalogs his bruises.

*

Driving out of L.A. is like a sign of things to come. Ray won’t stop making the hula girl on the dashboard dance, and he’s making Brad crazy. “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action,” Nate intones from the backseat, takes his nose out of his book.

“Fuck off, Thomas Jefferson,” Brad says. “Go back to your towel-clad reprobates.”

Nate smiles. He’s got Brad’s copy of _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ , dog-eared and spattered with what might be Ray’s mother’s tomato soup. Or someone’s blood. But it’s probably soup.

They get in to San Diego easy, sleep in the van and on benches. Nate wishes they had money for a motel. He’s up early again, walks around giving out slips of paper to the kids, what stage they’re on and when. Today’s good, three in the afternoon. He smiles a lot. They should get more people than yesterday.

Always at the base of his skull and the top of his spine he knows they’re more loved in California than outside it. If they can’t get more than thirty people at a time _here_ , why are they on Warped? Why the fuck did he bring them here and what is he doing what is he doing – “Hey man, come check us out, Bravo Two, we’re on at three o’clock at Kevin Says!”

At least half the time the paper gets crumpled in a pocket or on the ground. It’s like being back on Sproul Plaza and handing out announcements for protests and student clubs: no one gives a shit.

There are bright spots when Nate grins at people’s band shirts and gets a conversation out of them, cajoles half promises to come check out Bravo Two over a shared love for Gaslight Anthem. He gets to hear part of Poke’s set on the Nintendo 3DS Stage, White Man’s Burden blistering the skies with righteous anger. Yeah, Nate’s more than glad they’re signed.

But it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Nate stands in the full sun and knows that. Poverty is tied directly to literacy and the Tea Party wants to abolish public schools. The United States is fighting all over the world but not protecting civilians abroad or veterans at home. Nate’s in a punk band preaching to the choir and can’t get heard even here.

He looks out at their crowd of fifty kids at three o’clock exactly and howls. He sings “Tree of Knowledge” like it’s an answer to the feeble birds of his tethered anger. He’s got Brad driving and Walt keeping them steady and Ray singing harmony and it’s not enough to save the world. Watching from the stage is nothing like being in the pit.

Nate wipes sweat out of his eyes. Evan’s at the side of the crowd taking pictures. Nate nods at him, about to start the next song, when a girl in a purple shirt takes a swing at a guy in the second row. Nate jumps off the stage, no thinking, and is there with Ray and Brad in a second. There’s yelling all around him. No fights, he thinks. We’re together here.

Brad and Ray face off with the guy, a regular sneering punk kid, and Nate turns quick to the girl, ignores the cameras raised everywhere. She glares at Nate like she knows he wants to grab her arm. “He tried to put his hand down my shirt,” she says. She’s got a friend behind her trying to pull her away but the girl just looks at him, won’t back down. 

Nate’s sometimes selfishly grateful that he’s not a girl, usually doesn’t have to deal with That Guy, the asshole creeper who shows up in every pit. Nate’s glad that he’s got a stage to call that shit out, and to remind the new kids that hurting people who don’t want to be hurt isn’t the point. He looks at her and has no fucking clue. She’s got green eyes. He doesn’t know what she needs.

Nate turns abruptly, feels his own ineptitude, gets up in the face of the guy Brad’s talking to, and says “You need to leave.”

“Actually,” the girl behind him says, “he needs to get _thrown out_ of Warped. That shit is not okay.”

Nate half-hears someone say “What’s the big deal?” when he calls over security, two nice-looking guys with mustaches, convinces them the guy – sputtering, just a teenager (Nate hears Rebecca in his head, _Is that supposed to be an excuse_?) – needs to get escorted out. Brad and Ray step off, they all clamber back onstage, they start again. Nate looks around for the girl. She’s gone.

“The pit is yours, do what you want, but don’t be a dick” is what he used to say back at Gilman. He doesn’t think it was enough.

Afterwards he sits down for awhile before they all head to catering. He stretches his legs out on the pavement, hot even in the shade, and closes his eyes.

When Brad comes to get him it’s only 5:30 and the shadows aren’t grown long. Brad doesn’t say anything. 

On Warped there’s catering for 650 people, three meals a day. Dinner tonight is wontons and egg rolls and locally-sourced snap peas, and all the food service stuff is biodegradable. It takes about an hour in line to get into the catering tent, and Nate searches all the circular high-school cafeteria tables, looks at the buffet against the far wall. There are no women except the ones carrying food from the kitchen.

“Homes,” Ray whispers in what he thinks is an undertone, and undermines himself by pointing, “I don’t want to sit near _that_ table. Those are _those_ dudes.”

“Shut up, Ray,” Walt says.

Lilley and Gabe and Hector come up to them, plates already piled high. “Come sit with us when you’re ready,” Lilley says. “Did you guys know you’re already on a couple of blogs for the fight?”

Nate’s just quiet, taking everything in. When they sit down, he realizes Encino Man has the table next to them. It’s too much. He thunks his head on Brad’s shoulder.

Brad pats him, mock solicitous. “At last you have the Axe this year,” he says. Craig Schwetje, lead singer of Encino Man, went to Stanford. He warmed the football bench for them while Nate was in the Cal band, playing cymbals for honor and glory and to keep that trophy in Berkeley’s hands. Nate shakes his head and smells Brad's t-shirt. He doesn’t hate Craig, he just hates that Craig always tries to talk to Nate. The Bay Area scene is small. Craig thinks they’re friends.

Nate manages to look up with a smile when he feels someone standing next to him. “Craig,” he says. “Griego.”

“Nate!” Craig says. “How are you? I hear you’re roughing it. Sorry you don’t have a bus, dude.” Nate nods. “It’s tough all around this year. We’re on a slave ship.”

“What?”

“Our bus is for nineteen people, Nate,” Griego says, like Nate’s missed something obvious.

“And you call it a slave ship?” Poke asks from across the table.

“ _Everyone_ calls it a slave ship,” Griego says, and herds Craig and they leave, like that’s some kind of parting shot. Poke just shakes his head.

Nate looks around. Bravo Two is just a small part of the cog that turns the wheel here. There are hundreds of people finishing dinner all over the tent, and he wants to believe they’ll fight for what’s right. He wants to believe they’ll live for what’s worth dying for. He wants to trust himself.

Ray and Walt are considering a food fight. Gabe’s egging them on. Brad puts a hand on Nate’s knee. “It’ll be alright,” Brad tells him.

*

In Phoenix, it’s 109 degrees. Nate stands on the side of the stage and throws up during the bridge of “Wage Slaves,” drinks some water, and keeps singing. The kids love him even more. He’s their savior. Brad’s satisfied, watching them jump to the rumble of Ray’s bass.

“We love you, Phoenix!” Walt shouts at the end of the song, and throws them his shattered drumsticks.

Nate sings the ending chorus of “Destroy What Destroys You” with an arm around Brad’s neck, bowed into him. It’s too hot and too rank but Brad curves into Nate. He growls the words into Nate’s shoulder, mouth sliding in Nate’s sweat. Nate’s lost his shirt again.

Nate pushes off and leaves a rush of warm air. “Hey Phoenix,” he yells to the crowd, “do you like The Clash?” They roar back. “Yeah, me too.” He smiles. He’s good today. Brad’s got electricity in his bones from watching.

“Why do you try to cheat?” Nate asks into the microphone, center stage. “And trample people under your feet?”

Brad grins at Ray and waggles his eyebrows. “Don’t you know it is wrong?” they sing, a Motown harmony backup into their standing mics. Nate raises his hands. They pause and hold the silence. The crowd surges in the quiet. Then Nate brings his hands down and Bravo Two comes back in fast and hardcore and Nate screams. “ _You lie, steal, cheat and deceit! It’s such a small, small game! Don’t you know it is wrong to cheat a trying man_?”

Brad fucking loves this. 

They fly through the song three times as fast as Joe Strummer ever did. Nate comes out of it at the end shaking sweat like a dog. 

“Thanks, baby,” he says, and hipchecks Ray. 

The kids are hoarse from shouting. 

Brad loves punk because he belongs. This stage is home, trying to be a good guitarist and trying to make the kids feel. When he was sixteen and not in military school yet he let one of the punk girls in his pre-calculus class paint his fingernails turquoise under the desk. He smiles down at his hands. 

Afterward there’s Reporter, still hanging around the tour, now asking about politics in the scene (“Stupidity offends me worse than socialism,” Brad says), and Nate’s calling Baptista to make sure his fucking dead cacti get watered, and then Brad’s manning their janky merch table with Ray. They do a signing for a few kids in between bouts of Ray trying to stick his sharpie in Brad’s ear. 

“More beer,” is all Brad gets out of Nate that night at the barbeque pit. Catering does its three meals, but there’s barbeque after if the bands are hungry or have the drunchies. Kevin Lyman usually walks around to survey his domain. Brad’s talked to him a couple of times now. He’s a good tour director, holding Warped together through force of will. He used to go fishing with Mike. 

Brad brings Nate a cup and settles down next to him. Nate’s legs are long and freckled in the fugliest cargo shorts Brad’s ever seen. Nate’s careless, head tipped back and hands splayed behind him. 

The first time they really met after the Dropkick Murphys concert, Nate was wound so tight that Brad could hear the tension when he breathed. Mike had got the whole scene together to raise money for arts education, a day recording Woody Guthrie covers together in a tiny studio. They called the benefit CD _Tear the Fascists Down_. Brad had watched Nate sing “Union Burying Ground” angry, and went over to shake his hand. 

Nate’s more relaxed now. It pleases Brad. Warped Tour pleases Brad. He’s happy. 

* 


	2. Chapter 2

Two weeks in, a new issue of _Rolling Stone_ (Summer Music Festivals! 50 Bands Not to Miss!!!) comes out. There’s a five page spread on Warped, “with contributions by Evan Wright,” and in the bottom right hand corner of page 73 is a surprisingly clear picture of Nate bent at the waist and eyes closed, screaming into his mic. Reporter has Nate framed in the crowd’s outstretched hands.

Brad reads the whole article aloud at a sedate pace, making time for pointed agreement about “the surprisingly conservative, jock-oriented rising stars Encino Man, whose brand of punk recalls the anti-intellectual hard rock of the 1980s.” Eventually he gets to the end, a recap of bands worth seeing. “Combining the spirit of Against Me! with the fierce hooks of Rise Against, Bravo Two is a true California answer to Jersey’s Gaslight Anthem.” He looks up with incredulous eyebrows. “Not raising expectations much, is he?”

“Don’t be a wet blanket, Brad,” Ray says. “We’re _fierce_!”

Brad scans the rest of the paragraph silently and tosses the magazine aside. Ray idles through it. Then “Brad,” he asks, “why didn’t you invite us?”

“To what?”

“Your fucking commitment ceremony, dude. Reporter obviously wants to make an honest man out of you.”

“What?” Nate turns down Fistful of Assholes; Walt declared today dedicated to New Jersey, and they’ve already been through Bruce Springsteen and The Misfits, and Gaslight Anthem will be next.

The full article as read by Ray is well worth Brad’s betrayed look. “ _Brad Colbert, the steel-eyed lead guitarist whose punk nickname is ‘the Iceman,’ illuminates Bravo Two’s inspiration. Asked why he’s wearing a shirt with a picture of Robert Johnson on it, he looks into the distance and says finally, “A good blues song is like a ride on Highway One.” The only thing the rugged Iceman misses from home is his motorcycle. That longing for the road drives his haunting, ferocious (and yes, blues-influenced) playing._ ”

*

Brad takes another bite of his plum and clicks his tongue stud against his teeth. “I fucking hate PETA,” he says. “Shoving racist, classist shit on – are you listening?”

Nate’s distracted, tracks the plum mesmerized as Brad puts it down on the bench between them, juice pooling.

“What?” Brad asks. 

Nate raises wide eyes. He looks windblown. “There is nothing as erotic as the color of the inside of that plum,” he says.

Brad lifts an eyebrow. Very slowly, he sucks the plum juice off his fingers, one at a time. Nate laughs so hard he wheezes. Then he shoves Brad off the bench.

*

They spend the Fourth of July in Salt Lake City.

“I never wanted to come here,” Brad says, looking at another anonymous fairground. His hands feel empty without his guitar. Today is a day off.

Some moronic assholes are drunk and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with their hands over their hearts around the bonfire. Brad feels like singing “Baby, I’m an Anarchist” at the top of his lungs: _You watched in awe at the red, white, and blue on the Fourth of July; while those fireworks were exploding, I was burning that fucker and stringing my black flag high_.

Nate catches him humming. “We marched together for the eight-hour day and held hands in the streets of Seattle?” he asks, quoting.

Brad grunts. Nate’s fresh-faced after a shower, wears a Cal shirt, looks too fucking earnest to be believed.

Brad doesn’t believe in deities. He doesn’t believe in looking at someone and thinking _please_. He believes in doing, and when you can’t do, you get the fuck over it. He flexes his toes in his combat boots and feels the pale bloom of tension.

“I wanted to join the Marines,” he says to Nate. They’re sitting on the step of Poke’s bus. Everyone else is on the ground or in beach chairs, drinking boxed wine. Classy.

“What stopped you?” Nate asks. Brad waits. “Oh. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?”

Yeah. _Oh_. Brad takes another sip of his beer. Sam Adams. How fucking patriotic.

Brad doesn’t regret what he doesn’t have, but some days are harder than other days. “What do you want to bet,” he asks, and looks over at Encino Man’s bus, “that they have a ‘Support Our Troops’ sticker on there?”

Nate nods, and the silence between them solidifies.

* 

It’s Whack-a-Piñata Wednesday and Nate hangs around the barbeque pit waiting to find out if Walt’s won them anything. Last week Brad played in the guitarist round and busted the piñata on his third try and grabbed three prizes: the ‘extra case of beer’ coupon from the piñata’s belly, the ‘skip the catering line’ coupon, and the $100 bonus for breaking it. This week is drummer week. They could use more money for the van.

Somebody’s blasting “Dancing in the Dark” from a boombox and in the dusty gravel of the circled buses Ray and Brad are dancing with a bunch of other people, flailing arms and doof smiles. The Colorado sky is big.

Happiness settles in Nate’s throat. He flexes his hands and he feels his bones knit close. This is where he should be.

Today Bravo Two watched Encino Man play. Craig told the taut crowd that “The enemy is the enemy,” punk orthodoxy but Nate’s not sure what it stands for. Encino Man is popular, big lines for signings and inching toward playing the main stage someday.

Bryan Patterson came up to the four of them knotted at the back – Bryan Fucking Patterson, Nate used to have a WWBPD? shirt, holy fuck – and leaned against a merch booth. “Hi,” he said. He was _so cool_.

“Hey,” Brad said. Nate gaped.

“What do you think of them?” Bryan Fucking Patterson asked.

“They’re the next Nickleback,” Ray said. “Obviously.”

Bryan Fucking Patterson nodded. “Yeah.” Then, “I saw your set yesterday. Keep it up,” and he walked away.

“Nate, close your mouth,” Ray said. “You are not a codfish.”

Burn the Flag’s _Hail the Corpses_ was the first punk record Nate ever bought. He was thirteen and twitchy and needed something and that was it, guttural and bleeding. He’s never looked back. Bryan Patterson taught him that indifference is impossible.

When Bravo Two played today, some kids came with a little brother in tow, eight years old with orange earplugs and a dimpled smile. Brad waved from the stage and Nate talked to them after. The oldest girl wore a Tomatoes shirt.

Nate wants to write this rebellion with his body indelible. When the girl said “Thank you. I need this,” Nate said “You’ll be okay” and meant it, means it. He believes when he looks at his band. He believes in the pit, raised fists to open hands.

Now the sun’s setting and Nate’s in a parking lot and Brad’s dancing like a loon. The van will probably die tomorrow, but tonight everything’s alright.

“Nate?”

Nate turns. Behind him Craig is standing with two old guys, one tall and one short and red-faced in pre-distressed jeans

“Uh, this is Stephen Ferrando and John Sixta. From Maddog Records. I told them about you.” Craig looks pleased.

Nate gawps and tries to suck it in. Ferrando – “Godfather,” nickname remnant of a punk past – and Sixta are Maddog’s favorite A&R men. Talent scouts for a massive label. When Nate was fifteen he sent them a demo tape.

“Gentlemen. It’s good to meet you.” He leans forward to shake hands and doesn’t think about Brad and Ray being idiots behind him. He is professional.

Ferrando looks him up and down before he takes Nate’s hand. “Craig has told Godfather about you, Nate,” he says. “We’ll be watching.”

Nate is wrongfooted. “You’ll be watching?”

“Godfather likes what you’re doing.” Beside Godfather, Sixta is silent. Bryan Patterson walks past and looks at Nate, puzzled.

“Thank you.” Nate is professional. Bravo Two needs this. He will not be starstruck.

“Godfather doesn’t believe in promises.”

“Of course not.”

“But we were impressed by _Rolling Stone_ and what Craig says.”

“Thank you.”

“Godfather is interested. Keep it up, Nate. We’ll see where you are at the end of the tour.”

At this, Sixta leans close. “We don’t want any trouble, you hear? No more getting anyone thrown out.”

Nate swallows words. He wants this.

Ferrando’s abrupt. “Don’t think Godfather came here just for you, Nate.” Nate shakes his head. “We make no promises.” Nate nods. “But we _will_ be watching.” They clasp hands again, and as Ferrando goes he says, “You should keep this to yourself, Nate.”

“Why?”

“Godfather doesn’t want your men to be disappointed if this doesn’t work.”

*

Brad comes out of the gas station to find everyone’s changed seats and he’s now driving. Nate’s lounging up front with his bare feet on the dashboard. Brad gets in and throws jerky at Ray’s head. “As long as you didn’t change the CD,” he says.

There’s dead silence from the backseat as they pull out onto the highway. Then the synth starts up.

“NOW THAT YOU’RE OUTTA MY LIFE,” shouts Ray, “I’M SO MUCH BETTER.”

Walt joins in through heavy chewing. “You fawmt I’d be weak wifoutchoo bmut I’m shtronger!”

“Fucking hell,” Brad says. “For the love of Christ, _stop murdering Destiny’s Child_.”

“Brad,” asks Ray, “are you not ready for this jelly?”

Brad growls and skips to the next track. Nate is all innocence, turning to Brad with big round eyes. He lays a hand on Brad’s arm. “Betty, is that Jimmy’s ring you’re wearing?”

Brad can’t resist Nate’s grin. “Mm-hm” he says along with the song, glancing away like a shy teenager.

“Gee, it must be great riding with him,” Nate offers. Ray and Walt harmonize, and Nate hams it up, dropping second place to take it in turns with Brad to play Betty. Ray gets to scream “Look out look out look out look out!” and Walt makes the motorcycle sounds.

Nate keeps his hand on Brad until the end of the song, tapping along with every “Leader of the pack, and now he’s gone.”

That night Walt hums vrooming noises in his sleep. Ray snores. Brad lies awake remembering the feel of Nate’s hand.

*

Nate’s jittery in his skin. He wants to scratch it off. His feet are too warm and the bass drum of his pulse is too loud and his mind keeps going like a toy train all in circles and he’s tired and he can’t sleep. He wipes his hand over his mouth. 

It’s too hot.

He lies on the pavement and looks up at the light pollution.

It’s too hot.

Fuck this.

He gets up sticky and slow. Ray’s in the back of the van and Walt’s got the front seat leaned back. Brad’s with Poke. Nate fingers the cash in his pocket. He looks at his watch, lights it up, looks again. He starts quoting _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ in his head automatically, _Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat_ shut up. Shut up.

He slaps a mosquito. He doesn’t think about Colorado. He calls a taxi.

*

“I’m bored. I’m bored. Walt. I’m bored. There’s nothing to do.”

“Go spit in a shoe.”

“ _What_? That’s disgusting!”

“What? It’s what my mom says.”

“It’s not what she said last night!”

*

“Be good to each other,” Nate says at the start of a show and Brad knows it’s an act. They cover The Boss, “Working on the Highway” rockabilly with handclaps (and Brad’s fucking _unconvinced_ by rockabilly, okay, suspicious, it’s too country by half), and Nate grits his teeth through it. Their shaved-head punks are square-dancing in the pit, jazzhands hiding as raised fists, and Nate’s pretending.

“Much respect, much respect,” he says at the end, arms outstretched. He gets offstage angry.

“Nate,” Walt says, “are you okay?”

“I’m just hot,” Nate says. Brad looks at the way he holds his shoulders and knows he’s lying. They let him go.

Brad gets in on a _Lord of the Rings_ marathon Lilley’s running and Ray and Walt take turns at the merch tent. Ray propositions everyone when he’s selling shirts, pretty fucking equal opportunity. Walt lets people come to him.

Nate climbs into the bus during the Battle of Helm’s Deep. He sits on Brad’s sunglasses and they snap in half.

That night Brad pulls the van off the highway at a Walmart. He ignores Nate’s grimace of distaste in the parking lot, his half-muttered “You could buy sunglasses at a gas station.” If Nate’s not judging someone, he’s not happy.

They get out and Nate slams the door.

“Watch it! Fuck,” Ray says, “she’s old.”

Nate doesn’t say anything. He’s so fucking petty.

Brad tries to breathe normally but it’s hard. “Look Nate,” he says, “I know they can’t unionize, but I need sunglasses.”

“Resistance is a culture, Brad,” Nate snaps and Brad wants to punch his teeth in.

“What are you saying, Nate?”

“I’m saying, _Brad_ , that you can’t be for something one day and against it the next! Fucking believe in something!”

“I do believe,” Brad says, and takes a step toward him. “I believe you’re a self-righteous asshole.”

It’s a really stupid thing to say. This is why Brad tries to think before he speaks. Nate _is_ a self-righteous asshole and sometimes he acts like they don’t all fucking know what it’s like to want to fight, but pointing that out doesn’t help.

Nate doesn’t reply but he steps back and into the van and closes the door with an exaggerated slowness that sets Brad’s spine on edge.

“I don’t like it when Mom and Dad fight,” Ray says to Walt, but Walt just looks soberly at Brad.

They come out of the store to find Nate curled in the backseat completely asleep. His head is tucked under his arm and Brad can see an old hickey on his bared neck.

*

Listening to Burn the Flag is like the ugly feeling in Nate’s gut. It’s self-defense, sitting with his headphones on Poke’s bus steps.

Ohio isn’t forgiving. Today’s set was in the lee of thunderstorms. Nate’s danced in the rain at Warped before, mud-throwing in the pit, but he’s not a teenager anymore kinetic to get out of Maryland. Now he’s the one who has to give kids a safe space and a clarion call.

He tugs his left earlobe. Moshpits aren’t graceful but they’re a state of grace sometimes. No gods, no masters. If you fall down, you get picked up. Community and communion.

This morning Brad couldn’t find his razor. “You should have bought one at Walmart,” Nate said, and it fell half-flat as an apology but Brad cheerfully called him a fuckwit and stole his shaving kit, so they’re mostly good now.

One time Brad didn’t shave for two months and Ray told him he should quit punk and start a bluegrass band. Nate spent a week recommitted to learning the harmonica.

Nate thinks about Brad and watching the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal on the news together sprawled on their living room couch. Brad’s hand was tight around his beer when he raised it to the screen. Brad wears mirrored sunglasses like a dick and he leaves with no warning for weeks at a time to hike the Yosemite back country. He makes tea when someone’s sick and he’s giddy with little kids. On mornings he doesn’t work he goes out early to surf and comes home smelling like salt.

Nate wants to give him a record deal. He wants it for Ray and for Walt and for Mike and for the band together and he wants to reach people, but right now he mostly wants it for Brad. Nate’s stayed silent. He doesn’t want to disappoint them. If he can’t give this to them, he’s not worth their trust.

Poke comes up to lean against the bus. “Your crowds are getting bigger,” he says.

“You think?” Nate takes his headphones off.

“I’ve been watching. And Lilley says you’re getting good press, too, more than _Rolling Stone_ – local blogs and that shit. I’m glad for you, man.”

“Thanks.”

“You know John Fahey, the Berkeley blues guy?”

Nate’s a little thrown. “Yeah?”

“Nobody wanted to hire a young white kid to play the blues, so he sent away demo tapes pretending to be an old black man.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point, Nate, is that all you white boys have been colonizing long enough. The Beach Boys stole from Chuck Berry. The Rolling Stones stole from Howlin’ Wolf. When you make it big, don’t fuck up and forget the fight.”

Nate smiles at him.

Ray and Brad come around the bus mid-argument. “ – because this is a punk band, not My Chemical Romance, Ray!”

“Yeah, Brad, keep pretending you don’t know all the words to “The Black Parade.””

They continue right into the bus without stopping, hailed by Hector when they open the door, but Nate has time to see that the dark circles under Brad’s eyes aren’t any better.

He gets up and follows. “I think Bob was a roadie on Warped when he dropped out of My Chem,” he says. Brad’s leaning over and stretching his arms, hands locked together.

He looks up. “I heard about that.”

Ray and Lilley set up a game of Guitar Hero and Nate slumps down at the table. He raps his knuckles one by one on the bench, back and forth and back and forth.

When Brad sacks out on the floor, Nate and Ray join forces to draw a huge mustache on his face. Lilley films the whole thing.

*

“Nate!”

“What?”

“Beth Ditto or Tom Gabel?”

“Beth Ditto.”

“Joan Jett or Grace Jones?”

“Both.”

“Tim Mc –”

“Tim McIlrath.”

“Tim Mc –”

“Tim McIlrath.”

“Dude. Tim Mc –”

“Tim McIlrath.”

This time Ray just keeps talking over Nate. “TIM MCILRATH OR BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG, NATE? Nate? Nate? Nate? Hello?”

“Dude,” Walt says. “I think you killed him.”

“Brad!”

“ _What_.”

“Liza Graves or Liza Minnelli?” Brad looks at Ray long and hard. “Okay, I was just _checking_. You _are_ gay, you know.”

“Yes, Ray, I do know.”

“Paul Simonon or Buddy Holly?”

*

Nate’s in the middle seat, watching orange groves. “I miss my bike.”

Brad looks up from his book. “I know.”

Nate starts naming great riders, the ones he’ll never be. It’s a familiar conversation. Everyone in the band knows how this goes. July is Tour de France month. “I’ll never be Thor Hushovd.”

“No, you won’t.” But Brad’s not unkind. “Cal Cycling dominated every home race you did. That’s good.”

Nate wears his discontent without grace.

Walt turns around from the front. “You’ll never be Richard Virenque, either.” He smiles.

“A Frenchman who lies and dopes his way to a title?” Brad asks. “No, that’s beyond you, Nate.” He doesn’t say _I miss my bike too_. Some things are obvious.

“Not that Nate’s hang-ups aren’t _fascinating_ ,” says Ray, one hand on the wheel and one out the window flipping off a honking purple minivan, “but did any of you bikeless dicksucks – and I mean you, Brad – actually see a single turnoff for Gainesville? Because otherwise I think we’re lost.”

*

The Atlantic Ocean is not like the Pacific. It’s Nate’s past, not his future. He misses the wet light of Golden Gate Bridge fog caught on the headlands, the green water on a gray day, the green castle on Highway 1, the beaches between San Francisco and Santa Cruz.

Yesterday White Man’s Burden and Bravo Two and even Encino Man got into an argument about the best burritos in the Bay Area. The fight went on for an hour at lunch and only ended when Bravo Two had to play. It was a good show. Nate hopes it was enough.

He rubs his right wrist and looks at the bruise. Last night he made out with one of the tech guys and sucked him off behind a stage. 

Nate’s tired. He tongues his lipring. He misses the quilt on his bed at home, dark blue and made by a father long gone. Nate should call his mom. He should check in with Baptista about the cacti. He wants to talk to Mike about Maddog. He won’t.

*

Walt’s flipping through a giant book of CDs to find something they haven’t played six times.

“There’s always _Pocahontas_ ,” Brad says. He’s cradling an orange in his long fingers and it’s motherfucking obscene how gently he holds it, and when he peels it the scent is so lewd that Nate looks away.

Brad bought a bag from a farmer alongside the road a couple of days ago, and the van smells better now than it has in weeks.

“Do you want to paint with all the colors of the wind, Brad?” Ray asks. “You could paint a rainbow.”

“Green Day,” Nate suggests. 

“No, Nate,” says Walt. “The rule is something we _haven’t_ already heard today.”

“But they’re – ”

“No.”

“Nate,” and Brad is serious, leaning over to him until Nate’s pressed against the van window, “I can only listen to _American Idiot_ four times in one evening.”

“Fine.” Nate’s sulky. It’s not his fault that Billie Joe Armstrong is amazing. It’s not his fault that album is incredible. It’s not his fault that in 2004 it hit him when he needed it, and that sometimes your teenaged music is the only place you know yourself.

They end up with a mix labeled _bbq 8/7/10_. The first song is The Clash, and Nate looks at Brad in his aviators and wants a cigarette, something to do with his hands. _Sooner or later, her new friends will realize that Julie’s been working for the drug squad_ , Joe Strummer tells him. Nate shifts in his seat. _Well it seemed like a dream, too good to be true_.

He sings along in his head. He still hasn’t told them. He’s living show to show and what’s in between is feedback and white noise. He feels like his body is not his body, watching Brad and waiting on an unsure future, like he’s the conduit between stereo speakers for sound but not for anything tangible.

He roots around on the floor for something to read, but only finds six gum wrappers, an empty Diet Coke can, four gas station receipts, and Ray’s most recent attempt at Nietzsche. This time Ray’s doing _The Genealogy of Morals_ , which Nate’s already read and can’t take again. 

The next song is deep blues. Leadbelly sings “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” This must be Brad’s mix. Leadbelly’s voice isn’t mournful or even surprised, just low, just asking his lover not to tell lies.

By the time they hit Atlanta, it’s mostly too dark to read anyway.

The _whoosh_ of the city is under Nate’s skin just from looking out the window. It’s so goddamn hot and “I hope the air conditioning doesn’t break,” he says and the words taste purple in his mouth like an old bruise. The lights call them.

They leave the van out at Aaron’s Amphitheater (“Atrocious alliteration always,” Brad says) and hitch a ride downtown with one of Ray’s acquaintances (“My _friend_ , Brad” “You don’t have friends; you have people who tolerate you” “I’m hurt; does my devotion mean nothing?”). They want food. The Varsity is locals and tourists together and the onion rings are almost enough to make Nate renounce In-N-Out – almost. The long counter is hectic like the merch line at a stadium show. The orange slushie makes Walt moan, and Brad judiciously allows that the fried pie is “adequate.”

Ray and Greg the roadie want to check out the bar scene. Walt’s got some cousins he’s supposed to see. “Just you and me then,” Brad says to Nate when everyone breaks up outside the restaurant at 11 p.m. and the humidity is an ocean.

“I’m tired.”

Brad doesn’t shut down but he’s quiet.

“I just want to sleep,” Nate says. “It’s hot.” The sweat of the whole city runs down his arms and legs and he can’t draw a real breath now, looking at Brad’s face.

“Okay,” Brad says.

They head to the subway, but the station’s closed, so they walk. Nate feels hotter and hotter. They walk. The heat rolls through him.

They find the Fountain of Rings by the running laughter of small kids, turning a corner to a plaza of people shoving each other through circles of water. It’s the Olympic grounds, five huge interlocked silver rings throwing water into the sky for the cracked city. There are some people doing a conga line to the left. 

“Come on,” Brad says, and he takes Nate’s hand and pulls.

Nate’s foggy, overwarm, can’t react before Brad pushes him through a jet of cold water higher than his head. Brad stands over the jet laughing. The lights set under the rings catch on his sheen. He’s soaked now, water collecting at his throat and dampening his shirt. 

“Brad,” Nate says, “What the fuck.” Brad just keeps laughing.

The water wakes him up a little. Nate puts his mouth into a jet, totally ridiculous, and tries to drink some. It doesn’t taste stale. He eyes Brad, who stands still and watches him.

It’s too much. How does Nate know Maddog cares? They’ve said nothing since Colorado. What can he do but sing for them, and how is that enough here or ever? How can he not give this to Brad?

He flips water into Brad’s face, sudden, and Brad chases him out of the park. They find another MARTA station and throw themselves into an airport train just before the doors close. Brad’s trailing chuckles and Nate can feel water running down his spine to pool on the plastic orange seat. His sandals squelch on the floor.

They cant toward each other like tired houses. The only other people in the car sit opposite, a bunch of young teenaged guys dressed in tight jeans and band shirts. They’ve got suitcases covered in bumper stickers and one of them’s wearing Doc Martens. These are standard uniforms.

Brad leans close to Nate’s ear and whispers “No flannel in this weather, though,” breath hot. He grins, all incisors.

A couple of years ago Brad had a boyfriend who wore a flannel shirt for every goddamned day of the week. He had them as part of that same uniform at shows, at work, hanging out in Bravo Two’s apartment.

It fucked with Nate’s head. When he sees flannel, he wants to touch it. Brad knows. He’s helped Nate do laundry often enough, washed the flannel sheets Nate keeps on his bed year-round. He’s also stopped wearing what Walt used to call his “lumberjack shirt,” soft red plaid flannel with buttons.

Nate leans back against the wall and closes his eyes.

They get out at the Lakewood station and catch the 42 bus toward the amphitheater. “The meaning of life,” Brad says quietly.

When they get ‘home,’ Nate crawls into the back of the van and lies down on the foam pad. He’s exhausted. He needs someone to tell him everything will be alright.

Brad’s sitting on the pavement with his acoustic guitar. Nate hears the blues through the wall of the van and the liquor-drinking sounds of Brad’s songs beat into him. He lies on his back and feels like all the alcohol he should have drunk has gone to his head.

In the morning, the bustle of their closed society is back.

It’s another day of trying to be what’s needed in a country that doesn’t care, and again they won’t have time to stay for the barbeque and camaraderie of the late evening. Without a hired driver, they don’t have time to get to tomorrow and sleep too. 

Brad engineers a mission to the portable toilets, only ever bearable in the early morning or late at night, and then the day starts for real.

At least the acoustics here are amazing.

Nate sells merch or tries to, and he signs some CDs and a kid buys him a veggie burger and some corn on the cob “because my friend said you were great in Austin.” It’s very sweet. 

Poke takes the afternoon shift at the booth and Nate goes to hear Against Me! play. He gets close to the stage. The pit is his lungs, inhaling and exhaling. It is his heart tethered to the bass. It is why he knows to breathe and what keeps him upright through the rest of the day, stalwart anger.

When Bravo Two finally goes on and it’s getting dusk, Nate is so tired. He’s howling caged this call to arms. He looks for girls in the pit. He worries about the girl from San Diego. He preaches.

“Jump!” Nate commands. He pleads “ _Jump_!”

*

In North Carolina, Nate is silhouetted. “We’ll bleed for you!” he says into the microphone, low and deep. He lives it with every breath.

Afterward he almost stumbles away from them. Brad gives him five minutes before he follows.

Nate’s sitting quiet and contained leaning against the back of the stage, shadow bruises on his left wrist, bite marks at his neck. His head is tipped back and his throat is bared.

Brad knows Nate is solid to the foundation, but the angularity of him against the plywood is unsettling. Brad doesn't let himself think about the sex Nate finds when the pit can’t give him what he needs, but Brad still remembers Nate writhing at Tempo No Tempo’s last show. Nate danced at the heart of the pit eyes closed, made himself an object to hit, strobe lights flashing on half pain and half ecstasy. He’d gone home with some guy and come back the next morning with that same necklace of bruises, claimed.

When the point is taking it, sometimes Nate likes to be marked. Brad’s heard him through their shared bedroom wall. He begs.

Then, as soon as the guy or girl leaves, Nate’s in the kitchen talking to Brad about Cal football, the Big Game, wholly serious when he says “We have to beat them,” figuring out how to use friends’ ID cards to get the whole band into the student section of Memorial Stadium. He’ll drink milk out of the carton while Brad sits at the table, watching the way Nate swallows.

Fucking Christ. Brad does not have time to deal with this bullshit. He’s pathetic. 

“Nate,” he says, “come on.” Nate barely opens his eyes. Brad hauls him to his feet and walks him over to Poke’s bus, drops him in Poke’s bunk, and goes to find someone with liquor.

*

The CD player’s quit on them. They’re only getting radio, and only stations that play an ungodly amount of Taylor Swift.

Brad starts to sing “No Surrender” loud and off-key each time Ray extemporizes on Taylor Swift’s ballad-writing prowess. “ _That_ ,” Brad says, “is _real_ song-writing, you shallow inbred emotionally stunted hick.”

“Holy fucking shit, Brad,” Ray says. “You’re really good at lying to yourself, because that woman is a goddess with an unbridled talent for describing the human experience.”

The radio’s playing “Fearless.” Nate’s chewing on his lips and his spacers shine and catch the sun, an abrasive “fuck you” to the world.

If Brad keeps his mouth closed, no one sees his tongue stud.

 _You’re just so cool, run your hands through your hair, absentmindedly making me want you_ , Taylor Swift sings.

Brad has to concede that maybe she knows something about song-writing. He looks away from Nate.

Nate is not fragile. He is not small. But when Brad sits near him, Brad feels too large, like everything he wants is taking up too much space between them.

Last year Gabe demanded a karaoke party for his birthday. They went to the Down Low on Shattuck Avenue, both a close Tuesday night bar to walk home from, and because “Stage names required for all performers? Fucking _ace_ ” Ray had said. The floor was sticky and the large leather couches did not provide proper back support.

Nate was wasted out of his mind and sloppy. He always is when he only orders cheap tequila. He was clingy, face flushed, gave the birthday boy three kisses and cozied up to one of the bartenders. He sang Beyoncé’s “Ego,” and he sang it like it was for Brad. It was a performance, all slow sliding on the microphone stand and pointing at Brad sunk into the sofa.

 _It’s too big, it’s too wide, it’s too strong, it won’t fit, it’s too much, it’s too tough, he talks like this ‘cause he can back it up_ , and all the time Nate looking at him and everyone in the bar smiling knowingly, _he’s got a big ego, such a huge ego_. Brad was embarrassed and uncomfortable and angry and so turned on by Nate in an old gray shirt and a cocky grin.

“Nate,” Walt asked gently when he stumbled back to sit between them, “did you just sing a love song to Brad’s dick?”

Nate had curled into Brad and put a hand on his arm. “It’s a good song,” he said earnestly.

Brad’s kind of glad that they don’t really have the money to go out this summer. All of their merch proceeds go toward fuel and road snacks. There’s not much left over for new cities, so usually they stay inside the gates and eat the tour’s food. They’re paying their Berkeley rent out of savings.

The radio hits a patch of static and Ray turns it off.

After awhile Nate starts humming under his breath, mostly tuneless. “You get mixed up with the wrong guys,” he sings, Against Me! like always. “You get messed up on the wrong drugs. Sometimes your body takes you places that you didn’t really plan on going.”

“The _party_ , homes,” Ray says from the front.

“What?”

“The lyrics. Sometimes the _party_ takes you places.”

“Oh.”

Nate looks out the window. Brad looks out the other one. He needs his bike. He needs to be alone. He needs just a minute of sanity.

When they stop for the night, he’s going to fix the stereo.

*


	3. Chapter 3

In Maryland, Nate brings them new songs. They’re all about burning. 

This parking lot isn’t home but it’s close enough to feel too much like waiting at the window for dark and escape. The humid air is stifling like being a teenager and needing to run.

Nate loves his mother and he loves his sisters. He has had a good life and a privileged life and he reminds himself this, breathing slow through his nose while Ray and Walt bend over the new lyrics.

Chasing anger across the country to another coast isn’t any reason to feel out of his skin just because he’s near Baltimore again. But the air is a sense memory of lying on his bedroom floor and knowing his mother sat at the kitchen table 11pm, 12am, 1am, watching the clock for his father.

Loud music was a way not to be in his head. Today, it only reminds him of why he wanted to get out.

“I like these,” Ray says and he’s serious. “We can work with them.” He gives Nate back his notebook.

“The chorus,” Walt says. “For “Telegraph?” It’s really good.”

“Thanks.” Nate looks at them levelly but he isn’t level. He needs the breath knocked out of him. The inchoate anger of dancing in the pit isn’t enough right now, neck cricked from sleeping on a bench too early this morning and driving seven hours straight the night before. It was too much to try to sleep at his mother’s house.

His father is too large in the cage of Nate’s hands that won’t unclench.

He’s got the merch tent with Brad. Brad’s shuttered and amiable and says nothing to him. Nate smiles at the kids to whom he sells CDs and can’t take it. Brad is too close to Nate’s teenaged home and his teenaged bed. In Berkeley it’s easier to pretend that the surfboard in the hallway and the shared bookshelves and Brad making scrambled eggs in the kitchen are enough.

Here, they’re in closed spaces and Nate can’t not look at Brad and can’t not lean into him.

“Medium, you said?” Brad grins at a girl with black hair and hands her a White Man’s Burden shirt. “They’re pretty great.”

She’s got a sunburn going on her nose. “Yeah, fuck, I just, they say everything important, you know?”

Brad nods. “They do.” He doesn’t even make any jokes to her.

Nate’s impressed. Brad and Poke usually show their love by selling each other short.

“And um how much are those 7”s? I don’t think I’ve seen them before.”

“Five dollars,” Brad says. “You should try this one. We’re on the B side.”

“Really?” She looks half embarrassed for not realizing and half delighted. “Awesome.” She gives Brad a twenty for the record and the shirt and Nate watches her walk away, head on his hand. He can tell when Brad turns to look at him.

“Is your family coming tonight?” Brad asks.

Nate thinks _It’s not your fucking business_.

“Nate?”

He shakes himself. “Yeah, Clara and my mom.”

And it’s silence again. They watch the kids go by, day-glo bright and tight jeans and never enough water bottles for this heat.

When Nate was twelve his dad walked out on them and his mom became a single mother with three kids and house payments and no more military benefits and just a social worker’s pay check. When Nate was thirteen the older girl next door started playing punk music loud from her window and Nate bought _Hail the Corpses_. When Nate was fourteen he came to Warped.

He tosses a sharpie from hand to hand and thinks about writing band names on notebook covers to stay alive and wanting to crawl inside his stereo. Berkeley was supposed to be a way to a different scene and a different life, but nothing’s different if he can’t give his band what they need.

Godfather calls an hour before Bravo Two goes on. “Nate,” he rasps and Nate has no idea how he got Nate’s number, feels his pulse wild, “you’re doing well. We like what we’re seeing.”

“Thank you.”

“Keep getting the kids interested. Have you told anyone about our meeting?”

“No, I – ”

“Good. It gets complicated when people start publicizing promises that don’t exist.”

“But I want – ” and Nate’s talking to dead air. He whispers “ _fuck_ ” and argues to himself that he should tell his men, but it’s a coward’s protest, more clipped wings and pretense than nod to honor. He’s not going to tell until he knows he won’t disappoint them.

Instead he hugs Clara and his mom by the entry gate and takes them around to the sights. He points out the line for catering, and the douchey metal bands dressed all in black and self-importance, and explains that the singers shouting into microphones for “walls of death” want kids to run at each other in blocks because that’s more ‘hardcore’ than a mosh pit.

“Isn’t that kind of stupidly dangerous?” asks Clara.

“Yes,” Nate says.

This is a different kind of day. Bravo Two’s done one East Coast tour and Clara’s also seen them play in Berkeley, but now Nate’s showing Warped Tour to his mom. He feels twitchy for her reaction and wants Rebecca to be here. 

He frowns when they skirt Encino Man’s crowd and he knows her eyebrows go up. “Are you happy, sweetheart?” his mom asks finally.

“This is important, Mom.”

“I know, Nate,” and he remembers her balling socks in Baltimore and helping him unpack in the Berkeley dorms, “I know it’s important. But I also want you to be happy.”

“I am,” Nate says. “What else would I be?” Clara slugs him in the arm and he pulls her in close.

“You’re an idiot,” she says. “But we love you anyway.” She’s a sophomore studying dance and physics at NYU, and his older sister Margery is a firewoman in DC, and his mom is his fucking hero.

“I miss you,” he says. 

“So come home more,” Clara says. “We’re right where you left us.”

His mom smiles at him over Clara’s head.

Nate sings “We Must March” tonight for them, dedicates it at the end of the set with the sun in his eyes and his band at his back. Being in his body is better than being in his head. He holds his loss in his belly and sings it to them.

*

Brad understands pauses. He understands the tension before a song starts or begins again. He understands not filling the gap between important words with idle chatter. He does not understand the pause between himself and Nate. It makes him uneasy.

“What the fuck are you talking about, dude,” says Ray when Walt asks if he thinks there’s something wrong with Nate. “He’s more wound up than a yoyo, but he’s fine.” But Ray looks worried too.

Brad tells them both to shut up.

In response, Ray puts on Dolly Parton and turns “the volume up to 11, Brad, I don’t fucking care what you think, you’re an uneducated plebe and your lack of taste is really sad, dude.” He caterwauls along with “Jolene” with his feet sticking out the window.

They’re supposed to be working on the van. Nate’s at the merch tent.

Fuck this. Brad gets up and goes to find a pit to throw himself in. He is bone dry and needs the one place that he is not out of place.

Brad didn’t want to go to Warped when he was fifteen, told his friends it was for posers, but really he hated his body in a crowd. He stopped being afraid about twenty minutes in when one of his friends shoved him flailing into a pit and his arms went out instinctively and he knew the words to the chorus, jumping and screaming with his hands on the shoulders of the guy in front of him, head back and yelling along. He needs that now.

He gets in the first rough pit he sees. He doesn’t even know the band. He just checks that there’s no one he’s likely to hurt, and he shoves his way in. It’s where he belongs.

Afterward he goes straight to their stage. Bravo Two’s crowds are steadily bigger, and tonight playing at 6:30 there are almost two hundred people. Brad feels loose and waves to Bryan Patterson in the background. It’s hard to be on every day but this shit is awesome. It’s even an easy drive tomorrow and they get to stay for the barbeque.

After their set Brad showers with a hose in the parking lot and feels mostly at peace with the world. He sits on the ground with a Bukowski collection. Nate threw Wilfred Owen into his duffle bag but Brad isn’t in the mood for that kind of poetry tonight. He stretches out his legs and closes his eyes.

“Hey, I made sixty bucks today,” Nate says. He stands over Brad and kicks him in the ankle a little.

Brad opens his eyes. “For us?”

Nate looks shifty. “We sold four CDs and four t-shirts.”

“And?”

“And I gave some kids CDs for free so they’d donate to Doctors Without Borders instead.”

The White Man’s Burden/Bravo Two merch tent doesn’t have a tip jar, but front and center by the cashbox they have a mug with the Medecins Sans Frontieres logo on the side. Tim Bryan used to play bass for White Man’s Burden but now he’s a permanent member of the MSF field staff and goes wherever he’s sent. Sometimes they get angry postcards in the mail, Doc’s outlet, all expletives about the non-enforcement of the Geneva Convention and a brief “Hi. I’m glad you’re not here.” at the bottom. Whenever one arrives, Nate decides they should play a benefit show. It’s hard to argue about paying their rent in the face of that kind of need.

Brad looks up at Nate and carefully catalogs the shadows under his eyes that match the bruises at his wrists. Nate blinks owlishly at him.

“As long as we have enough money to get to Boston,” Brad says.

He gets his feet under him and they head over to their firepit. Lilley and Hector are using old tabloids to get the fire started, but Ray’s reading the _News of the World_ and refuses to hand it over.

“Looks like Batboy’s been seen again,” Nate says.

“I haven’t trusted the _News of the World_ since it told me Jerry Brown was actually Elvis,” Brad confides.

Somebody’s got a bag of marshmallows, and Greg’s bringing a case of beer over from the stack Kevin Lyman’s handing out. Hector’s shuffling a pack of cards.

“What are we playing?” Poke asks.

“Strip poker!” Ray says.

“We can’t,” Walt says. “Nate’s got no poker face.”

Nate protests this and is shouted down. Brad reaches for a beer. They’re collecting other people, some bands Poke knows, and there are guitars on the edges of the circle that make Brad’s hands itch for his own to hold. They decide on strip gin rummy, Nate notwithstanding.

Gabe starts singing Fall Out Boy off-key, “You’re going down, down, duh dee duh dee duh duh.” Brad understands the urge. He had a Fall Out Boy phase. _Take This to Your Grave_ was an excellent pop punk album. But right now that shit is just embarrassing, and Gabe should focus on getting beat. Brad tells him so.

Nate takes the beer right out of Brad’s hand and swigs it.

“Hey,” Brad says. He’s mildly offended.

Nate raises his eyebrows.

Brad decides to win. 

Nate really doesn’t have a poker face. Every card he holds shows in the curve of his mouth. He quickly loses both flip-flops and his belt. The worst hand at the end of every round forfeits clothing, and his luck is abysmal.

Brad’s down a shoe himself when Nate has to give up his shirt. He stands up and pulls it off slowly, working the reveal like a douche, and tosses it into Brad’s lap. It’s warm. Brad’s hand clenches. Nate’s tattoos waver in the smoke from the fire.

Nate sits down and they keep at it. Brad’s throat is dry.

The game’s been going awhile when Walt loses a shirt too.

“I am shocked, _shocked_ to find that gambling is going on here!” Ray cries as Walt takes it off.

“Your winnings, sir,” Walt says and hands the shirt to him with a bow. Ray’s not even really playing anymore, just waving his beer around excitedly like the misbegotten unmannered hick he is. 

“I’m tired,” Nate says as Brad calls gin again. They flip over their cards.

“Your pants, Nate,” Brad says quietly.

“Ooooh, Nate, watch out!” Gabe says. “Brad wants your pants!”

And Nate has watched _10 Things I Hate About You_ with Ray and his sisters just like Brad. He turns to Brad and does a perfect Julia Stiles, “I want you, I need you, oh baby, oh baby,” completely deadpan with hooded eyes.

He’s unshackled in his honesty and goddamned careless with it. He thinks that because he usually means what he says, he’ll be forgiven when he lies. Brad feels a curl of anger in his gut at Nate as well as at Gabe. Nate nods to them all and excuses himself to go sleep.

*

Outside Camden, New Jersey, the CD player breaks again. They’ll try to fix it when they get to the next shit parking lot in the next shit early morning. Brad sits sideways across the backseat of the van, eyes half-lidded and watching the red sunset. Walt’s sleeping in the middle seat through sheer force of will or maybe closet narcolepsy, and Ray’s trying to find a good radio station. There’s not much.

Nate looks at Brad and Walt in the rearview mirror. He taps his thumb on his water bottle. Wanting extra luxuries is an old, sour ache; he has a roof at home and food every night, and he knows that’s more than most. But he wishes he could fix this van for them. He can’t, and he’s angry always, and he can feel it in his wrists and his teeth are clamped, and if Ray doesn’t stop flipping through the stations – Brad looks up, so laconic. He meets Nate’s eyes in the mirror and nods gravely.

It’s hard to keep fighting. Nate’s tired. Throwing himself in the pit isn’t a release now, and giving the pit to other people isn’t a release either. Ray finds a station playing Otis Redding, and Nate nods back at Brad.

*

“Poverty is a suspect class,” Nate tells the van. He’s riding shotgun next to Ray and reading yesterday’s New York Times and everything is the debt crisis, and health care, and the minimum wage, and tax cuts for the rich. “It _is_.”

“Okay, college boy,” Ray says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, Nate. Absolutely nothing.”

It’s quiet for awhile. Nate goes back to reading. He ignores the roil of tension in the van and the thrumming in his blood.

They drive by a Walmart big and blue and obscene against the open sky. The silence now is vicious. It’s like a disgusting scab that needs to be ripped off. Nate’s coming out of his skin and he can’t stand this goddamn acquiescence when it’s so easy to say no. The bile fucking blooms in him.

“Why does your mom work there?” he asks.

“What?” Ray speaks low. Brad and Walt aren’t asleep but they’re not paying attention.

“Your mom. Why does she work there?”

“It’s not that bad, Nate.”

“They can’t unionize. If the workers try, they’re fired. Less than minimum wage. They’ve locked workers in at night, Ray. Locked them in.” Now Brad looks up, though he doesn’t say anything.

“You’re looking at the wrong side of it.” Ray’s too calm.

“Why are you fucking defending it?” Nate demands. “You don’t want us to sell there, if we ever get a deal. _You’re_ never going to be on the Wall of Heroes.” Ray’s mom put his brother up there. She brings newspaper clippings to show her co-workers about Bravo Two, but they don’t go on the wall.

Ray’s knuckles on the steering wheel go white and Nate doesn’t care. “Your mom had a _choice_ ,” Ray says. “A fucking _choice_ , Nate, do you get that? I know you got raised by just her and that sucked, I’m sorry, I really am, but goddamn it – ” he swerves around a green sedan going ten miles under the speed limit “ – she went to college and so did you and so did both your sisters. _Fuck_ you, Nate. Sometimes Walmart is the only place hiring, and a paycheck on the table is better than a hypothetical union.” He changes lanes without signaling. He’s now twenty miles over the speed limit.

“Poverty is a form of violence,” Nate says.

“Nate,” Ray says, “ _I know_.” He punches the CD player on and turns it as high as it will go.

Nate breathes. He breathes. He’s not wrong. Laura Ingraham, beloved by five million conservative radio listeners, protested healthcare two years ago by stealing and corrupting anti-Holocaust poetry. “First they came for the rich,” she said from the steps of the Capitol, perfidy against Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came for the Communists,” “and I did not speak out because I was not rich. Then they came for the property owners, and I did not speak out because I did not own property.”

That ugly iniquity was important to them for awhile; Nate doesn’t look now at Ray but he remembers Ray leading off more than one Gilman set by shouting “First they came for the rich and I did not speak out because _FUCK THE RICH_.” He always got huge cheers for that.

Nate’s feet are sweaty and the van doesn’t smell like oranges anymore and he wants to tell them everything. Ray’s not wrong. But they will get past this. He will give Ray more. He will give Ray more when they are not so isolated and when he can, when the deal is secure and he is allowed. Nate settles into his weight against the seat. They will get through this. They will.

Tomorrow after their set he’ll find someone to reconnect him to his body.

The hot cramped feeling in the van is too much. Nate rolls down his window and sticks his head out. The country is dirt brown. American Steel is in the CD player. “That’s one more broken hand from punching at the walls,” Rory Henderson sings to him, “I’ll stare into the sun until I can’t see at all –” Nate turns it off before they get to _one more broken man just crumpled on the floor, dear friends and gentle hearts_.

*

The Comcast Theater in Hartford has a parking lot as ugly as every other one in the country. 

“Nate,” Brad says. He grabs Nate’s arm, fingers digging in more than they should, and tugs him around the side of the van. He leans into Nate, leans Nate back into solid heated metal, gets his hands right up on either side of Nate’s face. “Nate. Promise me you will get in the pit tonight.”

Nate stares at him, completely calm and completely unmoved. “Brad. Get off me.”

“Nate –”

“ _Now_ , Brad.” Brad doesn’t move. Nate shoves him and he stumbles. Nate’s face is cold. “I’m going to shower.”

As he walks away he pulls his shirt off over his head, surely deliberate, and Brad can see the bite marks on his back.

His shirt is still off when he comes back to them. It’s held in a fist. He looks coiled. They stand before him shoulder to shoulder.

“Nate,” Walt asks, reaching out to touch a bruise on his side, “what’s going on?”

Every line of Nate is bone hard. He raises his chin. “Nothing.”

“Nate,” asks Brad evenly, “do you think you’re fooling us?”

Nate’s silent but he doesn’t look away.

Brad feels inexorable but Nate doesn’t even blink. “Do you think you’re not doing enough?”

“What?” asks Ray. “Not that I won’t believe any demented shit you come up with, Nate, liberal guilt is a beautiful thing, but _what_?”

Brad doesn’t know much about Catholicism. He does know that Nate keeps his faith or lack of it like a secret. Brad knows that it took him three years to accidentally find Nate at St. Joseph the Worker, being preached liberation theology and sitting in the last pew, mouth tight. Brad was there after a bet with Baptista. Nate’s face now, shoulders held back like he’s stone, is strangely like him concave, bent inward and hunched in church. Brad sat next to him, and Nate left without speaking. It’s a secret Brad’s kept.

Nate gives and gives until he shakes with exhaustion after shows. Brad doesn’t know if he’s ever at peace.

Ray stands waiting.

“Brad thinks,” Nate says, harsh, “that I fuck people to make up for not changing the world. That’s fucking – it’s ridiculous. You’re all ridiculous. You think my sex life is your business. It isn’t.” Walt looks dubious. “Stop judging me.”

“Nate,” Walt says, stronger than Ray or Brad, “we just want to make sure you’re being safe. At home you’re not, um, not usually this angry.”

That’s a lie, or at least it’s fucking unobservant. Nate’s always angry, and he always gives until he’s dry. Brad knows that what’s different now is that Nate doesn’t go in the pit anymore. He’s stopped. Usually he has both the pit and his own bed in which to escape, but now he has neither.

Brad feels too big for his skin. He’s hulking in front of Nate. “Take care of yourself, Nate,” he says.

“Jesus Christ, Brad!” Nate looks around at the other vans and gets quieter but no less angry. “Thank you for your concern, but _shut the fuck up_ and leave me alone. This is seriously none of your business.” Now he sounds almost desperate.

“Yeah, well.” Ray looks at him seriously. “Don’t _make_ it our business, okay?”

“Fuck you,” Nate says, eloquent always, and shoves past them to get into the van. They part again when he comes back out with his phone and stalks away.

“I’m still worried,” Walt says. Brad says nothing. 

*

Canada is not as different as Nate wants it to be. They play Toronto and Montreal and other than the sheer number of times Ray suggests Brad and Nate get married – “ _Le-fucking-git_ , homes” – it doesn’t feel much like foreign soil.

On the 2007 Warped Tour DVD, which they’ve all seen at least once and Nate has seen three times, Bad Religion tells the camera straight-faced that they don’t like bands that are so fucking desperate it’s oozing out of them.

Nate feels desperate now. Sorry, Bad Religion.

He’s waiting like rain in a desert for California. The days grate empty with no message from Maddog, and no one else wants Bravo Two either.

Brad’s clothing is still folded perfectly in his duffle bag. Nate’s isn’t. He’s rebelling in ways that don’t matter.

He wants to scream. There is no real time to make new friends or to see old ones or even to get some distance and ride in someone else’s bus. Start times aren’t given out until each day begins, and Bravo Two always needs to be ready to go on at 11:30 for no crowd.

Brad’s best at explaining why Warped should be so long. “We can’t just tour blue states,” he said monotone to Evan weeks ago. “Everyone needs something to believe, even kids in states so red they’re still fighting the War of Northern Aggression.”

“Of course you try to reach everyone,” Nate said when Evan turned to him. “What else would you do?”

But Nate buys an extra case of water at the gas station and pays with his back-up credit card and he is so tired.

*

In Milwaukee Nate wears an old UC Berkeley National Organization of Women shirt and talks to a tall girl. She’s an acquaintance of an acquaintance, Brad learns when Nate introduces her to the band as “Grace, my new lady friend,” smiling charming and insouciant at her, deliberately over the top because he is a dick. She writes show reviews for a couple of local blogs. She’ll shadow them today.

Nate sits with his hands on his legs. He leans close in to her and Brad is obtrusive, large and awkward at the merch table. He hawks CDs while they make eyes at each other. Grace is obviously amused by Nate, not buying everything he wants to sell, but she is also more interested than she will admit.

Before Nate cut it off, Brad used to help him spike his mohawk. Nate sat backward on a chair in their kitchen, chin on the rung, and Brad stood facing him with Elmer’s glue and feet planted solid on the linoleum. Now he looks away.

A well-grown kid wearing expensive and wrong jeans comes to Brad tentative. Brad sells him Bravo Two’s first EP, _Your Heart is a Weapon the Size of Your Fist_ , and the kid’s uncertain gratitude makes this long hot summer worth something.

“What do you think of Warped Tour from this side of the table, Brad?” 

Brad doesn’t like open-ended questions. Grace looks past Nate to try to include him in the conversation but she shouldn’t bother. Nate knows what to say in interviews. He shows reporters the feral center of him under his veneer of civility, and that’s irresistible. _Nate is not a fucking wild bird_ Ray has said sputtering about more than one write-up, but it’s what they want to see and if Nate shows them, they’ll write about the band. Brad hates it.

He knows Nate is all contradictions. Nate hates public transportation but rides it, will always give someone a seat on the train but shivers when he touches shoulders from standing during rush hour, is fastidious with his fingernails but bites his lips ragged. When Grace wants a picture for her story Nate insists on standing back, not a frontman, we’re all equal here, but he still talks about “getting the band to Warped” like he did it all by himself.

Fuck that.

And Brad is jealous of his smiles. Grace clearly knows her shit and Brad respects that but when did she last spend six hours with Nate watching grainy footage of The Clash on YouTube, hunched together over a piss-poor laptop? Hearing Nate talk about punk like a line is not new, chin down and glancing up like his love for this music is some vulnerable swallow of a secret, but it fucking rankles.

Bravo Two is not a punchline to help Nate get strangers into bed.

The day spirals. Brad stays calm for the kids but after hours they’re at a bar and it’s too hot inside. Brad doesn’t know the name. The refrigerator is somehow broken and the bar’s out of ice and there’s no good beer on tap and they can’t leave because Ray’s settled into a local pool game and he’s the only one fit to drive.

Nate’s kept smiling all night at Grace, looking her in the eye and telling his best stories. He’s had his hand on her knee for the past twenty minutes, leaning in and earnest like she won’t notice. She does.

Brad can’t watch anymore, forsakes Poke and Greg in a crowded corner – “Gentlemen” – and goes up to the bar and does four shots of shitty tequila in a row, makes up for lost time.

“Christ, Brad,” Nate says, unsteady on his feet and hand at Brad’s back. Leaning past, he orders two more bottles – _bottles_ – of Guinness for himself and Grace. Brad salutes him and walks away. He will not hesitate to slip out from under Nate’s warm hand although it’s heavy like a brand.

He looks for the back exit and hunkers down in a doorway off the alley. He considers finding a store to buy some cigarettes. “ _No, Brad, they’re bad for you!_ ” Nate said last year outside Gilman, mock-outraged and hand to his heart. He spent the rest of October begging and smoking other people’s, trying to hold Brad off whenever Brad lunged for him. “ _I’m a singer in a punk band, my voice has to be shot! You’re a guitarist who’s supposed to run marathons!_ ”

It’s still too hot to be comfortable, and there’s sweat sliding down Brad’s back. His shirt sticks to his skin.

The bar door opens and Nate and Grace fall out, sloppy but less drunk than Brad thought they were. Grace leads. Brad can see them perfectly from where he is across the alley and down a ways in shadow. They have no cover and they catch the ugly light of a neon sign. Nate trips, gets Grace up against the wall and starts dragging her skirt up slow and he’s kissing the side of her neck. She doesn’t look like she minds the brick against her bare arms, stretches luxuriously and pushes Nate down. He goes.

Brad should leave and should look away. He does neither.

Nate rolls down Grace’s stockings, mumbling into her kneecaps as he bares them, kissing up her legs. She shuffles impatient, sways a little, and Nate’s mouthing over her underwear and Brad can’t stop himself, fists tight.

When Grace bucks up and Nate murmurs “Good girl,” throaty, she just laughs at him “Don’t you wish” and says “Good boy” low and insistent, stroking his head as he kneels. 

Nate gets her underwear off and holds her ankle, lifts it until she helps and gets her leg over his shoulder. Somewhere there's a car horn. Right here is Nate happy, licking and pausing, trying to suck hickeys onto Grace’s thighs. Brad watches the back of Nate’s head and Nate rubs Grace’s clit with spit-slick fingers. He has no method. He’s doing whatever feels good, whatever she’s guiding him to, and Brad tries to breathe quietly.

Grace can’t grip Nate’s short hair. Her hands end up at the base of his skull. Brad can make out Nate’s pleased noises, obscene, imagines the wet sound of him sucking at Grace’s clit against the vibrations of the city. Her teeth sink into her bottom lip when she comes. Brad crouches down more, sweat caught in the grooves of his fingernails where they cut into his palms, and Grace’s eyes open and meet his. The sign flickers and her mohawk throws shadows.

“Nate,” she says. She pulls him to his feet and kisses him pretty fucking thorough. She is as tall in her boots as he is. She doesn’t look at Brad again. Brad can’t see Nate’s face at all. “Let’s get a cab. The band won’t be back for awhile.” They leave hand in hand. 

*

The van breaks down. “Major fucking complications, James,” Ray says as they shift to the shoulder next to another goddamned field. The heat makes the air waver. Walt gets on the phone to AAA and Brad tries to quiet the black dogs of his anger.

Nate wears the same Levi’s he’s had since Brad met him, holes at the knees and washed light blue. They hang low and this too is not fair. Sometimes Brad thinks that Nate is so cocksure and self-important and distant that Brad actually hates looking at him.

“What if we don’t get to the show?” Nate asks. He’s pacing. “What if we miss it?”

“Oh my _God_ , homes, stop _worrying_ ,” Ray says. “Sometimes it’s just punk, okay?” Nate snarls and walks away into the fallow field.

Ray rolls his eyes at Brad and climbs into the van to take a nap. Walt sticks his tongue out blue from a popsicle at Ray’s back. What is Brad’s life. There isn’t really any dignity out here. This divisive shambles isn’t the warrior glory he expected from punk rock at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen. It’s ignominious.

Nate’s fifty feet away rigid against the horizon line. Brad squints and starts after him. Nate turns around.

“She told me, you know.” His face is frighteningly blank.

“What?”

“Milwaukee. Hero and victim aren’t mutually exclusive, Brad. I don’t know if you were trying to win a bet or got caught in a bad situation or what, but that’s pretty fucking low.”

“What?”

“Did you think you were being stoic by not bringing it up? Because I’ve got to tell you, dude, that’s pretty weird, even for you.”

Brad feels hot and ashamed in Nate’s calm hard gaze. “I didn’t want to embarrass you,” he offers. “And I was drunk.”

Nate shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “Just do your fucking job.”

Brad raises his chin. “Yes _sir_ ,” he spits and Nate turns away again.

*

Evan Wright wants to do a piece on Bravo Two for rollingstone.com and call it “The New Face of American Punk.”

Nate misses Berkeley so much, the clear close safety of waiting in line for pizza at Cheeseboard or running past the _Dumbledore’s Army: Still Recruiting_ sign that he painted with Rebecca under the Strawberry Creek bridge the day before senior year began. 

They’re not new. They’re the same kids singing the same songs that punks have sung since 1976.

Nate misses the fish building. The Music Library looks like a fish, lumbering and covered in green shingles, and Nate loves how it lowers menacingly above Cal’s upper campus. Nate hasn’t been able to con his way in since he graduated, and he misses it.

He misses walking the rectangular ramps of the Berkeley Art Museum and sitting on the grody roof terrace at Café Durant reading Herodotus for the history lessons while eating gringoized Mexican food. He misses standing with Brad at the counter of Yogurt Park, best&cheapest frozen yogurt in Berkeley, Brad complacent about ordering a “sorority girl,” a cup of plain vanilla with cookie dough on top. “It’s fucking delicious,” Brad always says, shrugging. Nate misses arguing Indiana Jones versus James Bond and ending up watching _Moonstruck_ again, Ray’s head in Walt’s lap and Brad declaiming with the screen in his best bad Brooklyn accent. “You run to the wolf in me! That don’t make you no lamb!”

Nate misses lying awake in bed at two a.m. and hearing the Amtrak whistle from the train tracks down in West Berkeley, knowing Brad lies awake on the other side of the wall.

This holding pattern can’t endure.

The thing though, the swallow flapping madly in Nate’s gut, is that he still loves Warped Tour. People here believe.

He walks around today’s fairgrounds hell and tries again to give out flyers, “Kevin Says Stage, 5:30!” and breaks to cough. He can’t stop. He drops the flyers to cup his hands at his mouth and then some kid is waving an overpriced unopened water bottle in his face.

“Hey man, are you okay?” the kid asks. “Take my water.”

Nate stands up with streaming eyes.“Thanks,” he croaks around road dust and months of screaming in his throat. The kid’s tall and skinny and wears an Encino Man shirt. Nate cracks the seal and swigs the bottle. The kid waits to make sure he’s alright. “Can I get you a new water?” Nate asks.

“Nah,” the kid says. “My pleasure.” Nate nods and the kid walks away. Nate guesses that the mud in his throat is the taste of community.

He swipes his hand across his mouth and heads back toward the van. Brad’s throwing grapes at Ray and Walt is laughing so hard he has to lean on the door so he won’t fall over.

Craig stops him twenty yards away. For a second Nate’s in shadow like Craig’s blocked out the sun. Ridiculous melodrama, Nate tells himself. Heatstroke. Fucking get it together.

“Nate,” Craig says. “Good to see you, man.”

“And you,” Nate says, like Craig hasn’t been coming up to him at odd times this whole tour, like Encino Man hasn’t taken the dinner table next to Bravo Two for the last few nights.

“I’ve got a message.”

“Oh?” Nate is polite and inquiring and ignoring the hope in his fingers.

“Uh,” says Craig, gesturing across the parking lot at Walt’s baby blue shirt, _Save the Whales!!!_ written in bright pink, “Godfather says you should be more aggressive.”

“More aggressive.”

“Like, more force. Harder. Brad’s doing a good job.”

“What?”

Craig nods. “Yeah. Godfather said to tell you he’s a good guy. I mean,” he looks at his feet, vaguely shuffles, lowers his voice, “we all love Walt. But.” He lifts his head. “Nate, he can’t wear shirts like that anymore.”

“I don’t understand.” Nate breathes through his nose, fury beating too caged. They need this. “Do you think we’re not _macho_ enough for Maddog?”

“It’s not me, Nate. Godfather says –”

For their set that night, the sun of Kansas full in his face, Nate wears eyeliner for the first time in years. It is a useless rebellion.

He feels muted. Craig is trying and is desperate to be helpful but it is hard to forgive him for being signed already and for Griego’s famous comments about girls not belonging at rock shows. Nate reminds himself that he wouldn’t have paid attention to those comments if it weren’t for Rebecca. He reminds himself that he needs Craig’s friendship and advice for the good of the band.

After the set they shower and Ray tells them they will spend tonight driving straight, pissing in bottles and keeping to a schedule. They’ll drive toward the last week of Warped Tour, Kansas City to Boise in one stretch of sixteen hours and thirteen hundred miles.

Nate looks through his duffle bag for a clean shirt. He can’t find one. Brad doesn’t say anything but he hands Nate one of his own. When Brad looks away Nate smells it, and it’s the same scent as when he sings and presses his mouth to the join of Brad’s shoulder.

In the van Nate watches the sun through closed eyelids and listens to Arcade Fire on his ipod, “We Used to Wait” in the back seat, _I used to sign my name I used to sleep at night_ , and feels out the hollow space behind his ribs where his anger lives. It’s a solitary bed.

Ray is driving with no pants on. Walt is asleep. Brad is curled away from Nate and talking to his mother on the phone. Nate pretends this is all like being home in Berkeley.

*


	4. Chapter 4

Outside Seattle, Ray liberates a water balloon launcher from where it lies along a fence. This summer is hot until the last and Ray throws balloons and scoops up the wet dirt where they fall to try to start a mud fight. It’s benediction.

The Gorge Amphitheater is two and a half hours away from the city, but that’s close enough to call it Seattle and use the excuse to escape after set times are assigned. They can get back before they play. San Francisco is on the horizon with the Pacific and Nate breathes right for the first time in two months though there’s no fog today.

They get to the city and run along the waterfront mad for real waves and end up with early lunch at Iver’s – the clam chowder is never as good as it should be, Nate remembers this from northwest tours – and afterward Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. This is Seattle’s grotesque answer to Madame Tussaud’s. It’s cramped with shrunken heads and strange jars and deeply gauche souvenirs, “a licensed museum and gift store!”

 _Christ_ , Nate thinks. He almost knocks over a display of viking helmets standing against the wall.

“Watch it,” Brad says, hand on his arm.

Nate cannot measure Brad like this, careful in a painful way. Brad is Nate’s one sure thing, his center, but today he looks brittle.

“Yeah,” Nate says. “Thanks.”

Brad is like Warped Tour: giving and methodical and joyous and appreciative of a good toilet. Brad knows his purpose and is calm with it and to feel that he’s off shoves Nate reeling. Then Brad blinks and looks almost normal again, just a little hollow.

“Poke wants to do another split,” he says.

“Okay.” Nate ignores the three-tusked walrus skull by his elbow.

“As an MSF benefit.” Brad grins at him. “Lilley wants to call it _Gaddafi, You’re a Motherfucker_.”

“Nice,” Nate says.

They don’t go on until 5:45. When they do, he announces the upcoming record from the stage and gets a huge cheer. It’s translucent, his feeling looking at the crowd, because Bravo Two has no distribution but Nate’s voice. Yesterday a girl at the merch tent said she’d never heard of them but liked what he sang as she walked by. She bought one CD for herself and one for her friend.

Brad is a goad like the walking wounded. All Nate has to give him are raw chords. They’re not enough.

“First they take your life, then they exploit your memory,” he says to the kids. They play “Haymarket.” He wrote this song on the back of a napkin two years ago, sitting on the sidewalk in Chicago and leaning on the Haymarket Memorial. Anarchist symbols were spray-painted over every city-sanctioned plaque explaining the massacre.

“It’s as easy as breathing,” he sings, “but what makes you think I can breathe?” The pit surges in front of him. There’s a flash of pink hair and for a second he thinks it’s Rebecca, come back to be his other ballast.

He looks at the anchors on his hands and the _stay free_ across his knuckles, paid for out of financial aid grants in his first semester. He needed the reminder. Now he needs a way to preach and to protect too.

They start “We Must March” and a kid jumps up onstage. He slings an arm around Nate’s neck familiar and leans into the microphone with him.

Nate looks at Brad to his left, at the intractable hunch of his shoulders throwing him forward into the song, at how still he is inside himself. The pink shell of his ear in the sun is so vulnerable. Nate looks at the crowd in front of them, hands up and mouths open. He aches without Brad. He runs and jumps. He arcs until they catch him.

*

Crossing the border back into California they play Chuck Ragan. Brad respects him. He sings deep with just a guitar and says what he means and works with his hands, punk and carpenter both, _I can’t stand standing for nothing when standing up is all I know_.

“Did you know Chuck Ragan had a role in Star Wars?” Ray asks.

“He was the Force,” Walt says.

“Chuck Ragan grew a beard at the age of five – ” Ray starts.

“– seconds,” Walt finishes.

“Chuck Ragan loves the environment so much that now he carries the entire Revival Tour in his beard to save fuel,” Nate adds from the backseat.

Brad rolls his eyes. “Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas,” he says. “But Chuck Norris wears Chuck Ragan pajamas.”

They move toward the Bay, the last show on Warped. Brad pictures the map of California laid over the 5 South out his window. They’re right back where they started from. He grins.

They’re playing Pier 30 this year, older roots than Shoreline Amphitheater. Last year Warped was at Shoreline and Brad and Nate wandered around knocking into each other in the crowd. Shoreline is concrete and landlocked and sucked. Pier 30 is actual San Francisco, under the Bay Bridge out over the water and Brad waits for the salt in the air. It’s open, no packaged fuckwittery like how they play Frank Sinatra over the loudspeakers after every show at Cal’s Greek Theater, grating and impure, a sledgehammer knocking you out of your chest instead of back in it.

They’re coming home.

But they’re not sleeping in Berkeley tonight. It wouldn’t be right.

They take the 5 to 505 to I-80 west toward the coast and embrace the Bay. Coming into Berkeley from the north, Ray sweeps them out again over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, swings them wide and up and around through Marin to come into the city by the Golden Gate and Highway 1. Everyone’s looking right out the windows at the horizon, not inland as they go under the red towers.

The light’s perfect. Brad observes all and admires all. He loves this place, roads to ride and brothers to sing with and water to surf. He looks over his shoulder at Nate, pressed nose to the glass and spacers shining. His ink lies dark in the sun through the fog.

They drive through the city. It’s not sad – Brad breathes in the knowledge that his bike waits for him – but it is an end.

It’s a long night. They say hello to familiar places and Brad looks at Nate in familiar ways. He accounts for the distance between them, all smiles but walking three steps apart, with his own stupidity. Brad should be used to not getting what he wants, and he should move on.

It’s hard when Nate laughs brazen at the new skater kids along the Embarcadero waterfront, their tiny faces so disappointed to see the octopus-shaped blocks put up by the city to stop them from riding. Tourists delightedly take pictures of the metal sea animals on every inviting piece of concrete, but the kids trudge away verklempt. Brad looks after them fondly. 

They end up like always in the parking lot, the edge of the pier converted to a bus holding pen, drinking in a circle. It’s good.

The morning brings the last day of the tour and a sense of newness in Brad. “Let’s do this,” he says to Nate when they walk around passing out the same goddamn flyers, more high fives and recognition than anywhere else in the last two months.

“What?” Nate asks.

Brad wants to close this misunderstanding. “Look,” he says. “I was drunk and frankly that was poor behavior and I apologize.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Nate says, which is frustrating bullshit that Brad can’t parse, a reactionary caution that won’t accept the easy lie, but now they’re home and can put this behind them and start clean.

“Let’s do this,” Brad says again.

“Brad, I don’t –”

Brad places the flyers on the nearest merch table foursquare, ignores the t-shirt guy’s “Hey!” and grabs Nate’s hand. He starts running, fucking ridiculous, pulling Nate behind him. He’s listening for the right chords. He hasn’t been in a real pit since the other side of the coast and Nate’s been out even longer and needing it.

Brad runs through the twisting rows of merch tents and the smaller stages, dodging people and pushing through the lines like a jackass. Nate’s shouting apologies to everyone behind them but he hasn’t let go. Brad runs past Less Than Jake, good but too safe, too high school now, and gets them to the main stage.

Against Me! is on. Brad doesn’t stop at the back of the crowd. He tightens his fingers and pushes through even as Nate digs in his heels. Brad uses his body. Breaking through into the pit is worth it.

He lets go of Nate when the wall closes behind them. “Nate!” Brad yells at him over the noise. “Nate!” Nate looks at him wide-eyed and white-faced. _What the fuck is wrong with you_ Brad thinks and he shoves Nate into the storm.

Standing on the edge pushing off bodies is like watching something unfurl. Brad grinds his teeth as Nate is buffeted, stock still in the path of everyone running in a circle and punching in the middle of it, but then Nate’s spine straightens. He gets through to the middle and starts to dance, hands held with his palms up so he can coil off the other dancers.

A big guy knocks into Brad. Brad helps right him and shoves through to the middle too. He dances next to Nate with his head up and his eyes open. Nate closes his and feels it. Brad looks up at the blue sky and to the stage where the band sings loud and urgent and to Nate with his fist raised. Come on, come on. Yes. The bass fills him like religion and on his left Nate sings along and in front of him two girls jump for their lives. Yes. Yes.

When it ends too soon and never enough Brad’s dripping sweat. Nate grins at him more alive than he’s seemed in weeks and doesn’t say anything. He’s probably going to be hoarse when they go on tonight.

Their set is at 6:30 and they have at least 400 people packed in front of the stage. Rebecca’s right at the front, pink hair and wide smile a beacon, and she’s talking to Doc. He’s angry but not at her. There are seagulls overhead. Brad looks across at Ray, marks the set of Nate’s shoulders, and Walt counts them in.

It’s electric.

The crowd is feral and seethes onto the stage. By the end of “Speak of My Sleeping but Not of My Dreams,” three girls are clustered around Ray’s microphone singing backup with him. Nate’s got his arm around the shoulders of a young kid with an orange mohawk. Brad steps back to let a guy in a Clash shirt take his mic.

The pit is democracy. Rebecca and Doc are moshing and through flailing arms Brad sees Q-Tip. Nate’s howling possessed and Brad doesn’t know how he still has a voice.

At the end of the song Nate whispers, saving what he’s got for the music. “Hi San Francisco,” he says as the kids hang at the back of the stage waving to their friends and waiting to dive in again. “We’re home.”

“WHAT’S UP, CALIFORNIA?” Ray screams.

Walt takes over. “We missed you,” he says. The crowd cheers. “So here’s a new song.”

Poke clambers up from out of the pit and stands next to Nate. Brad sees Bryan Fucking Patterson near the back, arms folded.

“This song,” Poke says to the crowd, “is about this world’s hegemonic indifference to abusive power. We wrote it yesterday.”

They start into “Gaddafi, You’re a Motherfucker” and the pit rages. Four of the kids onstage take running leaps off it. The fifth does a cartwheel. Nate and Poke trade verses and sing the chorus together. Rebecca claps the beat. Doc might even be smiling.

This is why Brad does not regret the histories he can’t have. He is doing a righteous thing here and doing it well and no one tells him what he can and cannot say. Next they play “Tell It to the Marines” and he sings with Nate.

They end with “We Must March” and the sun is turning the Bay Bridge red. “Follow well in order,” Nate sings, “get your weapons ready. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

Nate’s standing looser than he has in days. Brad sees no bruises but he recognizes a guy in the crowd who Nate made out with once on the couch at the back of Gilman.

Brad growls the next verse with Q-Tip and John sharing his microphone stand and thrilled out of their minds. He doesn’t ignore that Nate has hugged Walt and Ray and Poke and most of the kids onstage since they began playing but hasn’t touched Brad once.

“Do you hear me?” they sing. “Do you hear me?”

“Thank you, San Francisco!” Nate calls at the end. It’s painful to hear. His voice is rubbed raw. He should be whispering again. “We love you!” He starts to cough. “We’re home!”

They walk off the stage and Nate is still coughing. Ray hangs off of Walt. “Fuck me,” he says. “ _Fuck me_. We just played Warped.”

“Yeah, but no,” Walt says. “But thanks for the offer.”

Nate’s phone rings in his pocket. Brad looks at him. He had it during the set.

Nate waves them on. “I’ll catch up,” he says.

They head out to the front of the stage and Brad hugs Rebecca. He clasps Doc’s arm.

“DUDE!” Q-Tip tackles Ray.

John hovers. “That was pretty baller,” he allows.

It’s credible pandemonium by the time Nate comes to them. His face is pale and Brad stops.

“What is it?” he asks. Nate doesn’t say anything. “Nate, what is it?”

Rebecca leans around Brad and Nate smiles wanly at her. “May I talk to the band alone, please?” he asks.

They walk around the side of the stage. It’s not private but they can pretend. The sun sets.

“We got signed,” Nate says. He looks blank.

“What?” Walt asks.

There is a very fine tremor in Nate’s hands. “Maddog Records. They want us in L.A. to sign a contract tomorrow.”

“How did this happen?” Brad asks. His voice is cool. He’s proud of that.

“They started talking to me in July.” Nate raises his head and looks around at them all. “They want us. I said yes. We sign tomorrow.”

Ray finds his voice. “Nate. Maddog Records wants to sign us, and you’ve known since July?”

“No. I’ve known they were interested.”

“Maddog Records, home of commercialized crap rock and creative _fucking_ accounting against its bands and motherfucking _Encino Man_ , and you think this is _good_?”

“It _is_ good,” Nate says. “And I already told them yes. I need someone to go with me. Brad?”

*

Brad sits in an L.A. motel chair in a white shirt and dark pants. He wants to roll up his sleeves but instead he leans down to slip on his shoes. He listens to Nate getting ready in the bathroom.

He is forsaken. He tastes the word and rolls it around on his tongue. It fits better than ‘bereft’ or anything so nuanced as that. Brad prods at the feeling in his belly and puts it aside on a breath. It is his duty to Walt and to Ray to see this through. He will stay calm.

Brad left Southern California deliberately, and now he’s back to talk to the same assholes he tried to sever. He concentrates on that supreme frustration instead of why Nate would want this. 

Nate wants Brad to wear a suit. Brad is wearing a suit. It’s a good suit, bought when he was in L.A. last summer for a cousin’s bar mitzvah. Nate’s suit is not as good.

Nate comes in fiddling with his shirt cuff. Brad looks. Nate’s lost a button and is trying to close the cuff with a safety pin, fingers too controlled to be anything but unhappy, and Brad stands. He backs Nate into the dresser and keeps him there. He takes Nate’s right wrist in his left hand. “Hold still,” he says. He tries not to feel Nate’s pulse.

Brad jams the safety pin into the shirt. Nate doesn’t even wince when Brad jabs him. He’s staring over Brad’s left shoulder at the uninspired wallpaper and breathing steadily. Brad breathes with him. Brad gets the pin closed and drops Nate’s wrist like a coal.

“This is stupid,” he says evenly. “We don’t even want this.”

Nate looks at him all command, a cold sweep head to foot. Brad burns. “You’re good. Let’s go,” Nate says.

*

Nate was fourteen the first time he got in a pit, fourteen when he learned what his body is for. Standing in the slick foyer of Maddog Records, he remembers catching himself against the wall of some kid’s basement and launching back into the storm, overcome. He feels sick.

The ache in the arches of his feet is for Berkeley, carousing mad men and poets and walking on Telegraph Avenue.

The ache in his hands is for Brad.

Nate is scraped raw nerves, what he wants and what he doesn’t the chorus in his head. They don’t understand that he wants this for them. Brad doesn’t understand that Nate wants this for _him_. Every morning Nate looks in the mirror he’s not enough to protect them or enough to really make a difference. He needs amplification to keep a roof over their heads.

He is so angry that Brad won’t just shut up and do what he’s supposed to do so Nate can save them all.

Nate is void.

Brad is silent beside him and Nate can’t bridge and can’t joke away his quiet. After Warped there was no “What _up_ , CBS Outdoors!” shouted to the giant blue office building on 580 at the Gilman St. exit, driving back to Berkeley after the show. There was no camaraderie. There was no time at home. They unhitched the trailer and they packed and they got back on the road.

And now they wait.

Finally the receptionist in Buddy Holly glasses tells them they can go up. They ride the elevator still quiet and walk down halls covered in deep carpet to muffle their sound. Gold records are on the wall. Even the doorknobs are opulent.

An assistant directs them and Nate pushes open a clear door. Brad walks two steps behind him.

Godfather sits at a large sleek desk in front of panorama windows. He’s kept his nickname; he’s a man retaining dreams of relevance, Nate thinks. Sixta sits on a black couch. “Sir.” Nate nods. “Sir.”

Brad mumbles something.

Nate does not feel welcome but he reminds himself that they probably code fear as not masculine, not righteous, and that Bravo Two needs a new van. He’s not sure it can get them back to Berkeley.

“Gentlemen,” Godfather says, “We’re glad you’re here.” He pushes a sheaf of papers to the middle of the black desk. “And without a lawyer. We can get to business.” Nate feels Brad shift behind him. “But there are some things we need to say.”

Sixta gets up and comes over to lean against the desk. They haven’t been asked to sit down. “You didn’t police yourselves,” Sixta says.

Nate starts to say “We tried” but is cut off.

“That fight with the kid that was on the blogs, and now this Gaddafi song. What’s that?” Sixta asks. He’s glaring at Nate. Nate is sure he knows how much Nate’s suit didn’t cost, and about the safety pin.

“White Man’s Burden,” Brad says. He’s emotionless. “We’re doing a song with White Man’s Burden. It’s a benefit for Doctors Without Borders.”

“No,” Godfather says.

“I beg your pardon?” Brad shifts again.

“The idea is good, but you need to change the title.”

Nate is sick inside and pretends to be as dumb as he surely is for standing here so he asks “Which spelling do you prefer? That’s the BBC –” and Godfather turns around in his big leather chair, the only one with the grace of sitting, to look back out at the L.A. skyline.

Nate’s been dismissed. Sixta says, “No, Nate, we need to _sell you_. Damn it all, we need to sell you across America! We need to sell you at Target! Walmart! They won’t let you have that kind of title!” and Nate closes his eyes and thinks of Ray and nods. They can do this. This is their array of choices.

He opens his eyes and Brad stands at his right hand looking not at these men but at Nate. He's as worried as Nate’s ever seen. Brad’s arm twitches like he wants to reach out but he doesn’t.

Godfather turns around again. “You don’t feel courted, do you?” he asks. He leans forward and looks right at Nate. “Good. You shouldn’t. You need to want this. Punk should be hungry. But we need to set some ground rules, and we need to talk image.”

“There will be a dress code,” Sixta says.

“A _dress code_?”

“Yes! You all need to look like real punks, not goddamn Berkeley hippies!” Sixta always speaks in barks and it throws Nate, it makes him feel reprimanded and not wanted and not good enough. He looks at Brad again. Brad is starting to look ill too but still he stands here.

“No,” Nate says.

“Excuse me?”

“Fuck it,” Nate says. “It would start with clothes and a title, wouldn’t it? And then it would be cover art, and then it would be what’s in the songs. No. Fuck this.”

He doesn’t wait for what they’ll say. He’s furious not at them murine but at himself so fucking dumb as to think this was right and he could do this alone without the band. Maddog probably isn’t evil, but it’s not right for Bravo Two. He leaves.

He doesn’t look at Brad. He trusts that Brad will follow.

“Nate,” Brad runs down the hall after him. “Nate!” Nate stops and Brad reaches out. “It’s okay,” Brad says.

Nate turns and slams Brad into the wall and stays there. “Listen,” he says. “It is _not_ fucking okay. I am really fucking sorry, Brad. I’m sorry I misjudged them and I’m sorry I tried to figure out what was best on my own and I’m sorry Ray and Walt aren’t with us and I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

Brad’s pulse jumps in his throat and Nate eyes it almost detached. His adrenaline runs. He tightens and relaxes his grip on Brad’s shoulder while he watches the pulse.

There is color high on Brad’s cheekbones. He breathes slowly, and Nate becomes aware that his leg is between Brad’s and that he still holds Brad against the wall.

“You didn’t disappoint me,” Brad says carefully. “I didn’t understand why you did it, but you could never disappoint me.” He is static. Nate still hasn’t let go. He looks at Brad’s hands held flat against the wall, the same capable hands Nate’s watched fix their grimy Berkeley sink, the same long fingers that Nate watches caress Brad’s guitar.

Nate breathes out and should step back. He should not ever assume that Brad wants what Nate wants. Nate cannot fuck this up. Brad is the center around which he revolves. Get out of the hole, Nate tells himself.

He looks up. Brad is staring at him with everything he wants too on his face.

“Nate,” Brad says, voice low, and Nate feels the rumble of it in their shared breath, “I trust your judgment.”

Nate kisses him. 

Brad inhales, mouth open shocked and Nate keeps kissing him, wants Brad so badly he aches with it, kisses him flavored with all the ways he needs him, isn’t polite and isn’t soft and isn’t gentle. 

Brad’s hands move, one to Nate’s jaw and one behind his head no quarter, takes Nate and holds him how he wants him, holds him still and takes and takes and takes. Nate gives it all back. It’s not the first time Nate’s kissed someone with a tongue stud, but everyone else was a stand in.

They’re still wearing jackets and Nate gets his hand up under Brad’s, under his shirt and his undershirt and onto hot skin, rocks his leg up and Brad keeps kissing him.

Nate’s loud, inarticulate. The noises he makes could mean anything. He doesn’t give a fuck where they are. He wants to strip Brad here in this hallway at Maddog Records and look at all of him. He wants to unbutton Brad’s cuffs and roll his sleeves up and look at his arms tanned and strong. He wants to fuck Brad and be fucked by him and go to bed together in their own apartment. He wants to go home.

*

They go home.

They go home and they call Ray and Walt from the 5 and Nate tells them everything, apologizes until Brad puts a hand on his wrist and says “Enough,” and the whole drive north Brad measures the distance between them and it is none. They changed at the motel out of suits and got their bags and Brad looked at Nate stand in that sterile room against those beds and Nate looked at Brad and they left.

Berkeley is better. Brad has never wanted Nate bloodless, but only ever for all the ways they know each other. He wants him at home.

On the road they cycle through albums and don’t say much. Brad watches Nate watch him. The drive is forever.

The Berkeley light is gray. It’s August fog. They park in the pitted driveway and walk up the wooden stairs and let themselves in and Ray’s tour laundry is strewn everywhere. Walt’s left a note beside a dead cactus on the kitchen table, _Baptista says sorry about the cactus! We’re at Jupiter’s! Pizza and beer! Come meet us! We love you! :) :) :)_

Nate doesn’t bother with the cactus. He puts down the note and reaches for Brad and drags him down the hallway to the bedrooms. They almost knock over Brad’s surfboard.

Brad hears his bubbe’s voice in his head as he looks at Nate framed in his doorway. _You’re making a cake out of yourself, Bradley. Are you sure this boy is worth it?_

Yes, Brad thinks. Yes. This is like his first mosh pit. His blood feels the same.

Brad walks forward and Nate stands braced.

“Take off your shirt,” Brad says. Nate does. Brad touches Nate’s ink, runs his hands along the vines on Nate’s arms and the anchors and the swallows and the poetry. He holds Nate and leans and kisses the ship and the waves.

He steps back. “Take off your pants,” he says. Nate does. His cock is hard and Brad advances and he’s still wearing jeans and he scrapes against Nate. Nate makes a noise low in his throat. Brad can have this. Brad can have Nate. Nate is at his side onstage, in the van, at home, and now he can have Nate in his bed too.

Brad’s mattress is on the floor with the same white sheets as always and his blues records lean against the wall. As he pulls his shirt over his head he has a moment of disconnect that Nate is standing here like this.

Nate sits on the bed and Brad takes off his pants and grabs lube and condoms and dumps them next to the mattress. He sits too and pushes Nate flat, his arms laid over Nate’s arms. Nate’s elegant hands are clenched and Brad can’t stop himself. He bends and kisses Nate’s knuckles, the _stay free_ on them, lifts Nate’s hands one after the other and kisses his fingers wet and open-mouthed.

He licks the skin between them and bites Nate’s thumb gently, teeth on the pad of the finger.

He pauses. “What do you want?” he asks.

Nate takes a breath. “I want to be here.”

“What do you like?”

Nate smiles unembarrassed. “You know.”

Brad sits up and back. “I’m not in your head, Nate,” he says. He feels tightly bound. He cannot do this wrong. He is caught in the uncertainty of action and in the planes of Nate’s skin. 

“I want to be here,” Nate says again. “That’s what I like. Make me be here.”

Brad can do that. “I trust you to tell me if you’re not,” he says. Nate grins. “Turn around.”

Nate turns and _No Surrender_ is thick and black across his shoulders.

Brad bows him down until Nate’s head touches the sheet.

Brad kisses between the words and bites him incarnadine, working down Nate’s body and writes his love on Nate’s spine, honors each vertebra.

Brad moves for the lube but the soles of Nate’s feet are so fucking vulnerable, the arches facing up and his ankles stark. Brad runs a finger down the left arch feather-light and Nate throws his head up and laughs. Brad starts tickling him for real and Nate kicks involuntary and gasps when Brad won’t stop.

Nate undulates and Brad is undone. “Mmph,” he says, grinning at Nate where he’s turned to look backward with an open mouth, “what do you like?” Brad moves back up Nate’s body, fingers pressing into the places with no ink, the waiting in between the vines and the veins on Nate’s arms, unmarked but no cleaner than the rest of him, no barer.

He dips and breathes deep between Nate’s shoulder blades where he smells like sweat and cotton.

Brad is not efficient. Nate has a mole on his side and Brad runs his finger in circles around it, the same spot over and over. Nate’s shoulders tense and creep up until Brad bends down and licks and exhales over it. Brad bites and fills in Nate’s sleeves. The clean lines of ink filter light among the bruises.

Brad cups Nate’s kneecap under him and thinks clearly _This is how I want you_.

He doesn’t touch Nate’s cock but he starts to work him open, rawboned with the feel of Nate around his fingers. The arch of Nate’s back is like the longest day of the year. “I’ve got you,” Brad says. Nate is not small but he feels small to Brad here held in this way, thumbs on his seams.

He has Nate turn over again and draw his legs up and Nate keeps himself open because Brad says so.

Brad counts Nate’s tattoos with his mouth and his hands. Then he moves to Nate’s cock. He rolls the ball of his stud around the head, knows from experience the difference between only metal and the warmth when he swallows around Nate. He works up the underside of Nate’s cock. He looks up and Nate’s eyes are wide and dark.

“Please,” Nate says, “fuck me. Brad, _please_.”

Brad looks away. He puts a condom on, asks one more time “Do you want this?” and Nate nods, and Brad asks “Do you want this?” and

“ _Fuck you_ ,” Nate says, hand around his dick, “you _know_ I want it.”

Brad presses in and fucks Nate as hard as Nate asks. He holds Nate’s fine-boned ankles and looks at his freckles. He is known.

Nate rubs his cheek against Brad’s sheet and Brad strokes Nate’s cock. He’s touching every part of Nate. Nate keeps saying “Please” and it’s so different to hear through the wall Nate ask to be fucked harder or see across an alley him kneel at someone’s feet, and to feel the reality of him unlocked now.

Nate comes as Brad fucks him, stripes across his belly and Brad’s hand. Brad holds his hand up to Nate’s mouth and Nate licks his come off of Brad’s fingers. Brad’s heart arcs a parabola. He flashes on Nate in their kitchen, head back and laughing, and he looks at Nate here in Brad’s bed smiling with a bruise on his neck and Brad comes too.

*

When Brad walks back in with a washcloth, Nate’s left foot is hanging off the bed and his head is pillowed on his arms. “I’m going to get you a dog,” Nate says.

“What?”

“Domestic bliss, Brad. It requires a dog.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Well, if Ray’s laundry weren’t in the sink…”

Brad can feel his grin is too wide. “Fine then. I want a wolfhound.”

*

They name her Sheena ( _is! a! punk rocker!_ ). When Nate comes home from the farmers’ market with something cradled under his hoodie, Brad thinks at first that he’s protecting a new cactus against the rain. Then a little gray muzzle appears snuffling under Nate’s hem, and Nate gently scoops her out and hands Brad the shyest puppy he’s ever seen. She’s a rescue dog. She’s also a wolfhound.

Standing three months later in their own new kitchen, at an apartment-warming party that moves from Q-Tip’s gift of cactus fertilizer to Lilley and Gabe lining up Jäger-trains – a rank insult to the Jameson on the windowsill – to Baptista trying to teach Sheena (now bigger, and less shy) _roll over_ (“Good dog, good dog! No no no _not the beer_ –”) to Brad’s mother laying her palm on Brad’s cheek and leaning close to whisper “I’m so proud of you,” Brad holds Nate’s hand.

Walt and Rebecca are arguing economic development theory on the porch. Mike and Poke are sitting at the table shoved under the window, talking to Ray’s sister about social work. Ray’s somewhere playing DJ. Pretty soon Brad’s going to have to remove him as unfit for duty. For now, he leans back against the counter.

Nate looks at him. “Satisfactory?” he asks. There are still shadows under his eyes. He’s back at Swords to Plowshares, and last week he applied to the master’s program at Cal’s School of Public Policy.

“Yes.”

Nate’s fingers tighten around his. They are anchored.

“Copy that.”

*

Nate holds the Pacific to him. They’re at Ocean Beach escaping next-day party dregs – Ray asleep on the couch and Walt and Rebecca lying face-down miserable on the floor – and San Francisco is at Nate’s back and the horizon line is before him. Nate smiles.

Brad’s throwing a frisbee for Sheena and wearing Nate’s sweatshirt. They’ve got late season green apples and a happy dog. Driving over the Bay Bridge, Brad turned the radio loud like a gift. Tomorrow night, Q-Tip and John open for Tomatoes at Café du Nord, punk taking care of its own. This is a good November.

Nate grinds his heels into the cold sand and crunches an apple. The frisbee lands at his feet and Sheena bounds up. “Did you lose this?” he asks politely, and throws it as far as he can.

Sheena forgoes the chase to bark at kelp that’s washed ashore.

Brad comes to stand next to Nate. “She has no discipline,” he says.

“You like her that way,” Nate says. The happiness in his stomach is warm. Brad is fists raised together and communion and himself and he is here with Nate. They are shoulder to shoulder.

“Hey,” Brad says. Nate looks at him. Brad kisses Nate and Nate drops his apple. His phone rings. Brad pulls back but keeps a hand behind Nate’s head and raises his eyebrows.

Nate doesn’t step away.“Hello?” He doesn’t recognize the number.

“Nate? It’s Bryan Patterson.” _B F P_ Nate mouths to Brad, though he’s leaning so close he’s not sure Brad has room to read his lips. “Hi, listen, I know Maddog wanted to sign you. I’m glad you didn’t go with them.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I think Bravo Two’s good and I think you have a lot to say.” There’s a beat. Sheena dances around them. “Did you know we used to be on Maddog?” Nate remembers something vague, some acrimonious dust-up at the beginning of Burn the Flag, decades ago – “They don’t treat bands well and they don’t treat punk well. Fuck, Nate, I’m starting something small, Alpha we’re calling it, and I don’t know what the distribution will be like or anything, but I think you guys are great. If you all talk it over and you’re interested in being on the label, you should give me a call.”

Nate lets go of Brad’s shirt. He looks up. Brad’s bent close and listening. “We want this,” Brad says.

*

The release party is at Bottom of the Hill, good beer and a low stage. “Sweet children,” Nate says, and counts them into “Telegraph,” “this is for you.”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the music talked about in the story is posted in mixes as Chapter 5.
> 
> Nate works at the [Starry Plough](http://www.starryploughpub.com/eventscalendar/upcoming) (where he loves the weekly poetry slams) and [Urban Ore](http://urbanore.com). He volunteers at the [Berkeley Public Library](http://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/services_and_resources/literacy_program/become_a_volunteer_tutor.php) and [Swords to Plowshares](http://www.swords-to-plowshares.org). The church mentioned in the story is [St. Joseph the Worker](http://www.stjosephtheworkerchurch.org). Brad works at [Moe’s](http://moesbooks.com), one of the better bookstores in the universe. Ray works at [Rasputin](http://www.rasputinmusic.com), record store of my heart. Poor Walt really does work at the [Sur la Table on Fourth Street](http://www.surlatable.com/browse/storeLocator/storeHome.jsp?storeId=003). Gunny works at [Nabolom Bakery](http://www.nabolombakery.com). If you ever get the chance to eat Nabolom’s cinnamon twists, you should. They’re _amazing_.
> 
> [924 Gilman](http://www.924gilman.org/blog/?page_id=9) was founded in 1986 as a safe space. [Here](http://www.sfweekly.com/slideshow/is-924-gilman-turning-into-just-another-punk-club--37553163/#1) is a great slideshow of the club, accompanying an article about whether the club's ideals are slowly being compromised. The couch at the back is where Brad saw Nate make out with another dude; the curb outside is where Nate and Rebecca sat after Bravo Two's last show before Warped; those rules really are painted next to the ticket counter - the article is about whether they are still enforced. (Diving isn't.)
> 
> At Bravo Two’s last show before Warped, Nate references Mario Savio, an influential Berkeley student and leader of the Free Speech Movement. In 1964 he stood on Sproul Plaza and said this: “[ _There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop_](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx9BJRadfw).” Unnnffff he was so hot. Also, “We Must March” is heavily influenced by Walt Whitman’s “[Pioneers! O Pioneers!](http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wwhitman/bl-ww-pioneer.htm)”
> 
> In case you’re curious, the great zine [I Live Sweat](http://ilivesweat.tumblr.com) is hosting an ongoing discussion of sexism and safety issues in punk. The series stems from a wider conversation in the community about Ben Weasel of Screeching Weasel verbally and physically assaulting a female fan at a SXSW show this spring. The first piece in I Live Sweat’s series is by [Lauren Denitzio](http://ilivesweat.tumblr.com/post/2929328480/you-know-what-makes-me-feel-unsafe-lauren-denitzio).


	5. Chapter 5

I listened to a lot of music while writing, mostly these mixes. There are a bunch of Bay Area bands here that Bravo Two would listen to, and maybe see. Also, many of these bands have been on Warped. (For songs which might be triggering, and for links to the mixes sans those songs, please see the bolded trigger warnings in the excerpted lyrics below.)

Links:

• [Mix 1](http://www.sendspace.com/file/6byzme)  
• [Mix 2](http://www.sendspace.com/file/wb4kr8)  
• [Mix 3](http://www.sendspace.com/file/9fe2je)  
• [Mix 4](http://www.mediafire.com/?mo2rc7k64pc3w29)  
• [B Sides](http://www.mediafire.com/?jcm5rp42iaxg323)  


[ **Mix 1**](http://www.sendspace.com/file/6byzme) [82 MB]

1\. Janie Jones – The Clash (demo)

_he’s in love with rock’n’roll whoa  
he’s in love with getting stoned whoa  
he’s in love with Janie Jones  
but he don’t like his boring job, no_

2\. Let Them Know – The Briggs

_revolution can be more than a dream  
in a flash of brilliant light  
millions upon millions can be seen_  


_…breaking down all the walls  
‘til every last one of them falls_  
  
3\. Working on the Highway – Bruce Springsteen 

_working on the highway laying down the blacktop  
working on the highway all day long I don’t stop_

4\. Rockupation – Mad Caddies

_it’s all about what you wear the color of your hair  
and how many tattoos you got on your arm  
so how did we get here where’d it all go wrong_  


_…I think back to the day when all the bands used to play  
without giving a shit about what was in  
now it’s changed, scene’s rearranged  
let’s start it over again_

Although the Mad Caddies aren’t a Bay Area band, they’re on the Fat Wreck Chords label. It’s owned by Fat Mike of the band NOFX and is run out of San Francisco.

5\. Boxcar – Jawbreaker

_I’m coloring outside your guidelines  
I was passing out when you were passing out your rules  
one! two! three! four!  
who’s punk what’s the score?_

At one point, Jawbreaker was based in San Francisco!

6\. Look What Happened – Less Than Jake

_we rode across that bridge all night  
we talked our way through city lights  
traced all the lines we’re killing time  
under those buzzing signs  
from downtown to anywhere but here  
tonight yeah I swear to these rooftops  
and just hoped that car would never stop_  


Less Than Jake used to be on Fat Wreck Chords.

7\. Teenage Riot – The Ataris

_no matter what you do still some things never change  
seen a lot of the world, met a lot of friends  
got a lot of fond memories  
there’s nothing like playing a basement show  
on a Saturday night in Pennsylvania  
start the show, here we go  
jumping in the crowd  
we’ve gotta tear this building down_  


The Ataris used to be on Asian Man Records, which is based about ten miles to the south of San Jose at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

8\. This is the Part – Gratitude

_this is the part where we start to feel better  
and stop shutting up  
we’re all running out of time_  


9\. We Are the One – Anti-Flag

_we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for  
we are the one united under none  
we are the one the one to carry on_  
 _…this year’s eve, we will breathe fury  
I will scale the city walls_  


10\. Basement Royalty – Broadway Calls

_give me a touch give me sensation of anything  
hail to the kings and the queens of basement royalty  
let’s roll our sleeves and taunt our defeat  
something to battle and sink in our teeth_  


11\. We Are All We Have – The Casulaties 

_we are all we have tonight  
this noise is all we got  
so let me hear you sing  
we are all we have tonight_

12\. Nose Over Tail – Alkaline Trio 

_crack my head open on your kitchen floor  
to prove to you that I have brains_

_…your voice like the sound of sirens to a house on fire  
you’re saving me _

13\. A Pillar of Salt – The Thermals

_we don’t want to die or apologize  
for our dirty god our dirty bodies_

The Thermals aren’t from the Bay Area but they have family here and play here often. About a year ago they got hired to play outside on the Berkeley campus and it started to rain in the middle of their set and everyone just kept dancing.

14\. Around the Horn – The Bronx

_give it a rest and then try it again with more soul  
until you learn that clearing your head’s  
the same as losing control in this space _  


15\. Gonna Find You – Operation Ivy

_back in school you ever get busted for trying to walk  
and have some administrator tell you  
“Son, you can construct your obligations  
and try to be different from you peers  
but responsibility for your future is gonna find you”_  


Operation Ivy is from Berkeley and grew up in the Gilman scene. They existed between 1987 and 1989. They’re hugely influential and also awesome.

16\. Emergency House Party – American Steel

_we only need a song to dance to  
we only need a chorus to sing along to  
pabst tall boys and all of our friends  
and everything will be alright  
if only for tonight _  


American Steel is from Oakland. They formed in 1995 and are still going strong. This song is from a CD where the liner notes thanked Gaslight Anthem!

17\. The Gauntlet – Dropkick Murphys

_it’s submission that they want  
it’s surrender that they need  
when we’re doing it their way  
their aims will be achieved_  


18\. I’da Called You Woody, Joe – The Gaslight Anthem

_this was the sound of the very last gang in town  
as heard by my wild young heart  
like directions on a cold dark night  
saying let it out you’re doing alright_  


_…and I carried these songs like a comfort wherever I’d go_  


19\. The Guns of Brixton – The Clash

_when they kick out your front door  
how you gonna come?  
with your hands on your head  
or on the trigger of your gun?_  


20\. Those Anarcho Punx Are Mysterious – Against Me!

_and we rock  
because it’s us against them  
we found our own reasons to sing  
and it’s so much less confusing  
when lines are drawn like that_  


21\. True Believers – The Bouncing Souls

_you can fight or you can run  
hide under a rock till the war is won  
play it safe and don't make a sound  
but not us we won’t back down _  


_…we live our life in our own way  
never really listen to what they say  
the kind of faith that doesn’t fade away  
we are the true believers_  


22\. How Far Our Bodies Go – Fake Problems

 _we were born in our mothers’ arms  
but we have since grown_

_…I know you’re not afraid but I think you will be someday  
when we learn to measure how far these bones can go_  


[ B Sides](http://www.mediafire.com/?jcm5rp42iaxg323) [46 MB]

Each mix has two b sides because I am way indecisive and I love ALL THE THINGS. All eight songs are in the zip folder linked above.

1\. Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen

_we gotta get out while we’re young  
‘cause tramps like us baby we were born to run_

This song does need a **trigger warning** for the following lyrics, from the first verse of the song: _In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream/ at night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines / sprung from cages out on Highway 9 / …this town rips the bones from your back / it’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap_. If you’d like to download a version of the B Sides Mix that doesn’t have this song on it, there’s one  **here** .

2\. Thrash Unreal – Against Me!

_this night is gonna end when we’re damn well ready for it to be over  
worked all week long now the music is playing on our time  
yeah we do what we do to get by and then we need a release_

[**Mix 2**](http://www.sendspace.com/file/wb4kr8) [86 MB]

1\. Try This At Home – Frank Turner

_the only thing that punk rock should ever really mean  
is not sitting ‘round and waiting for the lights to turn green  
and not thinking that you’re better ‘cause you’re stood up on a stage_

2\. Simple Pleasures in America – Arrivals

_I don’t wanna just hate on rich folks  
though that’s kind of how we have our fun_

_…for the rest of our lives we’ll probably work for someone else  
so for tonight we are HAVING A PARTY_  


3\. Back to the Youth – Cobra Skulls

_all I ever wanted to do was to just get into the music  
and take my body to a show where I could abuse it_

_…sometimes I can still hear them singing singing about a riot  
as if they'd like to try it just for fun  
no regard for sacrifice no one’s getting organized  
I am reminded we’re only getting nothing done  
so let’s use it to lose it let’s take back the music_

Cobra Skulls are orignially from Reno, but now they’re based in San Francisco and they’re signed to Fat Wreck.

4\. Kids With Guitars – Actionslacks

_you think things are gonna stay the same?  
when we’re gone  
only three things will remain:  
cockroaches and castaways and kids with guitars_  


Actionslacks are from San Francisco.

5\. Here’s Your Future – The Thermals

_God told his son, “It’s time to come home  
I promise you won’t have to die all alone  
I need you to pay for the sins I create.”  
Son said, “I will but Dad I’m afraid.”_

6\. Reinventing Axl Rose – Against Me! (live)

_we want a band that plays loud and hard every night  
that doesn’t care how many people are counted at the door_

_…they’d strike chords that cut like a knife_

_…with this fire we could light just give me a scene where the music is free  
and the beer is not the life of the party  
there’s no need to shit talk or impress  
‘cause honesty and emotion are not looked down upon  
and every promise that’s made and bragged is meant if not kept  
we’d do it all because we have to not because we know why_

_…let’s make everybody sing that they are the beginning and ending of everything  
that we all are stronger than everything they taught us that we should fear_

7\. Boomboxes and Dictionaries – The Gaslight Anthem

_and if you’re scared of the future tonight  
we’ll just take it each hour one at a time  
it’s a pretty good night for a drive  
so dry up those eyes dry up those eyes  
because the radio will still play loud  
songs that we heard as our guards came down_  


8\. Greenback Dollar – Chuck Ragan & Laura Jane Grace (orig. Hoyt Axton)

_when I was a little baby  
my mama said, “Hey son  
travel where you will and learn to be a man  
and sing what must be sung”_

Chuck Ragan, most famous as the lead singer of ~seminal punk band~ Hot Water Music, lives in California about two hours to the east of San Francisco. One of the best albums ever written about California is his _Gold Country_. Laura Jane Grace is most famous as the lead singer of ~seminal punk band~ Against Me! And they both def show up a lot more on here.

9\. Beach Party – Hard Girls

_there’s a party at the beach  
be discreet when you bring the wine  
don’t get caught like last time  
bring a sweater and a coat  
it gets cold when the sun goes down_

Hard Girls are from San Jose. Yay for more Bay Area city diversity! This song is I suspect about a Northern California summer.

10\. Keasby Nights – Catch 22

_when they come for me I’ll be sitting at my desk  
with a gun in my hand wearing a bulletproof vest  
singing my my my how the time does fly  
when you know you’re going to die  
by the end of the night_

11\. Born on a Saturday Night – Mean Jeans

_I was born on a Saturday night  
I was born with a beer in my hand  
got a lot of shit from my old man  
he could never understand_

_…I was born on a Saturday night  
I didn’t get laid I got in a fight_

Mean Jeans are from Portland but one time they had a song on a compilation from the teeny San Francisco label Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club. Cool story, bro! Yeah, this is that song.

12\. Mad Men – The Briggs

_come all you mad men  
join in the sound ‘til they put us underground  
buried deep buried deep where the dead men sleep  
with bellows and screams we’ll all sing  
so loud we drown them out_

13\. Shove – L7

_get out of my way or I might shove  
get out of my way or I’m gonna shove_

14\. Minority – Green Day

_I want to be the minority  
I don’t need your authority  
down with the moral majority  
‘cause I want to be the minority_

Green Day is one of the most famous bands to ever come out of the Bay Area and the Gilman scene. Someone’s painted the words “sweet children” on a a beam high above the Gilman stage, which can only be a reference to their song/old band name.

15\. Wrong ‘Em Boyo – The Clash

_why do you try to cheat?  
and trample people under your feet?  
don’t you know it is wrong  
to cheat the trying man?_

_…you lie, steal, cheat and deceit  
it’s such a small, small game  
don’t you know it is wrong?_

16\. (Ballad of) the Black Comedy – Partners in 818

_it’s one more drink and I think I’ll cash out  
one more coming and if I hate this place why am I smiling smiling_

Although Partners in 818 are from Phoenix, they were also on that Silver Sprocket compilation.

17\. In My Eyes – Minor Threat

_you tell me that I make no difference  
at least I’m fucking trying  
what the fuck have you done?_

18\. Johnny Quest (Thinks We’re Sellouts) – Less Than Jake

_we try to keep the prices low  
for our records and our shows  
but is that is that enough  
or is it that we’re not punk enough_

19\. Tear the Fascists Down – Woody Guthrie

_there’s a great and a bloody fight  
‘round this whole world tonight  
and the battle, the bombs, and shrapnel reign_

_…our union’s gonna break the slavery chains  
I walked up on a mountain in the middle of the sky  
I could see every farm and every town  
I could see all the people in this whole wide world  
that’s the union that’ll tear the fascists down_

_…good people, what are we waiting on?_

20\. Tierra del Fuego – Dead to Me

_head high to get through this  
he knows he knows  
but he don’t wanna prove it_  


Dead to Me is a fucking awesome band from San Francisco. Their lead singer is named Chicken. Also, they’re signed to Fat Wreck.

21\. No Surrender – Bruce Springsteen

_we learned more from a three-minute record baby  
than we ever learned in school_

_…we made a promise we swore we’d always remember  
no retreat, baby, no surrender  
like soldiers in the winter’s night with a vow to defend  
no retreat, baby, no surrender_

22\. Track 05 – The City

_I swear that I’ve been here before  
this same crossroads and this payphone in my hand  
asking you what I should do, what’s our next move  
and where do we stand  
you reply just the same:  
“take it on the chin and beat him at his game”_

I really wish I knew the name of this song! I don’t. [The City](http://thecitysounds.net) are an awesome all-girl band that _rocks_ , and this song was the fifth track on a homemade EP they were selling at a show. There was no actual track listing. I basically want to quote the whole song at you – _I swear that I’ve been here before, the same four chords and this guitar in my hand, playing the same old songs, well shit I get it wrong every time that I can_ – but I’m trying to resist.

[ B Sides](http://www.mediafire.com/?jcm5rp42iaxg323) [46 MB]

1\. Rebel Girl – Bikini Kill

_when she talks I hear the revolutions  
in her hips there’s revolutions  
when she walks the revolution’s coming  
in her kiss I taste the revolution_

2\. I Shall Not Be Moved – Mississippi John Hurt

_just like a tree planted by the water  
I shall not be moved_

[**Mix 3**](http://www.sendspace.com/file/9fe2je) [117 MB]

1\. 10 West – Chuck Ragan

_oh California one thing that I’ll see  
it’s blacktop burning under the gun  
running state to state and I’ll wait  
for the sunrise and the calm before the storm  
pray I see no black dogs running  
and ride all night till the break of dawn _

_…oh California you’re where I need to be  
I’m heading to your mountains  
through your rivers on to your sea  
and I’ll make it only if I stay rolling_

2\. Milemarking – Banner Pilot

_now I’m just driving straight on  
I’ll scrape the freezing rain off this window pane  
a couple states from sane eyes aching drift awaken_

They’re on Fat Wreck!

3\. This Respirator – The Flatliners

_these four wheels feel like home to me_

They’re on Fat Wreck!

4\. Be Your Bro – Those Darlins

_I just wanna be your brother  
you just wanna be my boyfriend  
I just wanna run and play in the dirt with you  
you just wanna stick it in_

5\. All I Want – Civet

_all I want is you stand by my side  
I hope you’ll understand I respect you as my friend  
without you there’s no plan  
boys will come and boys will go just like streetcars_

I love Civet. Also, although they’re now based in Southern California, I swear that I once read somewhere that they were originally from up here; also, some of their songs reference the Bay Area.

6\. Born and Raised – Fake Problems

_on April 29th 1980-something I was born to a new proud mother  
she said she would always care for me ‘til the day she died  
and she’d never let anyone ruin my life but they sure try  
the day that I turned 18 my grandfather told me he said  
“Chris, I think you should join the army”  
I said “I don’t really think I’m cut out for that  
no I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t last”_

7\. I Still Believe – Frank Turner

_and I still believe (I still believe) in the sound  
that has the power to raise a temple and tear it down_

8\. This Might Be Satire – Propagandhi

_well I wanna chew my bubble gum with you  
and I wanna walk you home from school  
and I wanna carry your books to every class  
and I wanna fuck you up the ass_

9\. Fight or Flight – Starters

_and while I wait there’s just no chance I’ll ever sleep at night  
so I can’t wait until it’s over  
I lie alone while the city’s sleeping  
eyes wide open and a mind that feeds me  
all the reasons why I’m still awake_

10\. Good Kisser – Hunx and His Punx

_I just wanna put my lips on you  
I’m a good kisser and so are you_

One of San Francisco’s most fun hometown shows.

11\. The Song Inside Me – Heartsounds

_I found my true calling  
and it’s never sounded so fucking good  
I know this one part of my life  
will keep me breathing as long as I’m part of this song_

A Bay Area punk band that's super earnest!

12\. Boys on the Docks (Murphys’ Pub Version) – Dropkick Murphys

_say hey Johnny boy the battle call  
united we stand divided we fall  
together we are what we can’t be alone_

13\. Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts – American Steel

_but that’s one more broken hand from punching at the walls  
I’ll stare into the sun until I can’t see at all_

14\. Savior – Rise Against

_that’s when she said “I don’t hate you boy  
I just want to save you while there’s still something left to save”  
that’s when I told her “I love you girl  
but I’m not the answer for the questions that you still have”_

15\. Ode to the North American Snake Oil Distributor – Dillinger Four

_I try to raise my mind to stop the recoil  
there will come a day though smash your fucking halo_

16\. Oranges – Splinters

_why won’t you just fuck off  
I really like to eat my oranges in the park_

These four ladies recently graduated from Berkeley.

17\. Cause of My Anger – Dead to Me

_I want you to say that you understand  
how it fell right through your shaking hands  
it’s making me sick_

18\. Too Drunk to Fuck – Dead Kennedys

_went to a party I danced all night  
I drank 16 beers and I started up a fight  
but now I’m jaded you’re out of luck  
I’m rolling down the stairs too drunk to fuck_

The original famous San Francisco punk band. They helped create the scene in 1978, and lead singer Jello Biafra is still around playing music and making speeches.

19\. Cold War – Janelle Monáe

_this is a cold war  
you better know what you’re fighting for_

20\. Sunday Morning – The Menzingers

_don’t worry brother this will blow over  
don’t worry brother anything less is fucking surrender_

21\. Drive – The Gaslight Anthem

_and if you’re too tired go to sleep my brothers  
I’m alright to drive_

22\. Dancing in the Dark – Tegan and Sara (orig. Bruce Springsteen)

_you can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart_

23\. The Cities That You’ve Burned – Adam Haworth Stephens

_and in the ashes of the cities that you’ve burned  
we’ll sit and wait for your return_

Adam Haworth Stephens, most famous as one half of the band Two Gallants, is from San Francisco.

24\. Joy – Against Me! (demo)

_all’s quiet except for this song  
so maybe while I’m not together I can feel like I’m not alone  
and somewhere off in the distance rapidly advancing  
is an onslaught of sorts_

[ B Sides](http://www.mediafire.com/?jcm5rp42iaxg323) [46 MB]

1\. Road Song – Steel Train

_just let yourself go and sell your soul to the road_

2\. Walking is Still Honest – Against Me! (acoustic)

_can anybody tell me why God won’t speak to me?  
why Jesus never called on me to part the fucking seas?  
why death is easier than living?  
you can be almost anything when you’re on your fucking knees  
not today not my son not my family  
not while walking is still honest  
and you haven’t given up on me_

[**Mix 4**](http://www.mediafire.com/?mo2rc7k64pc3w29) [102 MB]

1\. Architects – Rise Against

_are there no fighters left here anymore?  
are we the generation we’ve been waiting for?  
or are we patiently burning waiting to be saved?_

2\. State of Emergency – Tempo No Tempo

_move your hips and you’re breaking my heart and you’re biting your lips_

Tempo No Tempo were from San Francisco. They disbanded recently but this song is still great.

3\. Sir Yes Sir – The Menzingers

_the books are there for our consumption  
now the the ashes are scattered on the floor  
get up get off your horse boy you’re nothing special_

4\. Survival Song – Andrew Jackson Jihad

_we just handed you a giant load of gibberish  
and I give love to a lover quite deserving of it  
and I give thanks to all of you for listening  
to the story of how we learned how to survive_

Andrew Jackson Jihad are on Asian Man Records. Also, this song quotes “Do-re-mi,” one of Woody Guthrie’s most pointed songs about California. Aces! However, it needs a **trigger warning** for the following lyrics, which occur in the second-to-last verse: _and I give a thank you to my father for not raising me / and I give a finger to my step father for beating me / and I give props to myself for achieving / God damn, I’m glad that I survived_. If you’d like to download a version of Mix 4 that doesn’t have this song on it, there’s one [ **here** ](http://www.mediafire.com/?faay9m6my30fki2).

5\. Eulogy – The Flatliners

_the sun shows no mercy this morning  
I’m staring thin-eyed as the rolling ground comes to a halt_

6\. White Lies – Fake Problems

_but oh hey my resolutions all fell away  
I guess I’m gonna have to call it a day  
tell myself it’s okay_

7\. The Ocean – Nothington

_I love the ocean ‘cause only there do my fears seem small_

Also from San Francisco! Previously part of the band Tsunami Bomb, from the North Bay town of Petaluma.

8\. Take Me Away – Civet

_take take me away  
show me my blood and give me all your pain  
don’t tell me no cause I’ve had you before_

9\. How We Know – The Thermals

_you spoon water like love and I will take it  
if you can take it _

10\. Animal – Against Me!

_our bodies collide together  
oh this ultimate betrayal_

11\. California Stars – Billy Bragg & Wilco (orig. Woody Guthrie)

_I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight on a bed of California stars  
I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight on a bed of California stars  
I’d love to feel your hand touching mine  
and tell me why I must keep working on_

12\. California Burritos – Chuck Ragan

_I can’t stand standing for nothing  
when standing up is all I know_

13\. Walking is Still Honest – Against Me!

_can anybody tell me why God won’t speak to me?  
why Jesus never called on me to part the fucking seas?  
why death is easier than living?  
you can be almost anything when you’re on your fucking knees  
not today not my son not my family  
not while walking is still honest  
and you haven’t given up on me_

14\. Meet Me By the River’s Edge – The Gaslight Anthem

_meet me by the river’s edge  
we’re going to wash these sins away  
or else we won’t come back again_

15\. You Are My Sunshine – Mississippi John Hurt (live)

_the other night dear as I lay sleeping  
I dreamed I held you in my arms  
when I awoke dear I was mistaken  
and I hung my head and I cried_

16\. Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah!) – Joan Jett

_begging on my knees  
baby won’t you please  
run your fingers through my hair_

17\. All Babes Are Wolves – Spinerette

_oh babe I would die for you  
oh babe I will never leave  
come on babe I never knew that you needed me  
I was born on the wrong side the wrong side  
the wrong side of everything_

18\. Faith in Fast Cars – The Format

_somewhere someone puts all of their faith in a fast car  
well California opened your legs _

_…I can only see you naked  
‘cause that’s all you’re good for  
I’m sure they all agree they take you home  
to help make you forget about me  
but they turn to sleep you’re wide-awake  
you spend the whole night staring up at the ceiling  
don’t justify now you’re no better than just me  
well could you please leave all your clothes on  
and let me sweat this out  
I can only see you naked  
you’re not in the car _

This song does need a **trigger warning** for the following couplet, which occurs twice well into the song: _well you said it was suicide on the Fourth of July / I say it saved my life_. If you’d like to download a version of Mix 4 that doesn’t have this song on it, there’s one  **here** .

19\. The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton – The Mountain Goats

_when you punish a person for dreaming his dream  
don’t expect him to thank or forgive you  
the best ever death metal band out of Denton  
will in time both outpace and outlive you_

20\. The ’59 Sound – The Gaslight Anthem & Chuck Ragan (live)

_well I wonder which song they’re gonna play when we go  
I hope it’s something quiet and minor and peaceful and slow_

21\. Trusty Chords – Hot Water Music

_“You'll get it right sometime you will”  
I tell myself that everyday_

_…I hate this place but I love these chords  
an empty fate just means an even score  
and the pain this morning it filled my head  
it’s Jameson it means that I’m not dead_

22\. True Believers – Hot Water Music (orig. The Bouncing Souls)

_we live our life in our own way  
never really listen to what they say  
the kind of faith that doesn’t fade away  
we are the true believers_

23\. Joy – Against Me!

_and there’s a joy a joy in all I can see  
a joy in every possibility_

[ B Sides](http://www.mediafire.com/?jcm5rp42iaxg323) [46 MB]

1\. If Work Permits – The Format

_now highways turn to tidal waves  
they’re asking me to export all of your insecurities  
but that wind that blows across your room  
it’s gonna set the sails and send me back to you  
sometimes when sailors are sailing  
they think twice about where they’re anchoring  
and I think I could make better use of my time on land_

This song needs a **trigger warning** for domestic violence in the following verse: _It’s a shame what your father did to your brother’s head when he smashed it with a telephone / and your mother got scared and locked the door / you were only four, but Lord you remember it / so now you’re scared of love; I’m here to tell you love ain’t just some blood on the receiver / love is speaking in code, it’s an inside joke, love is coming home_. If you’d like to download a version of the B Sides Mix that doesn’t have this song on it, there’s one [ **here** ](http://www.mediafire.com/?bho3pduzmufwl26).

2\. The Backseat – The Gaslight Anthem

_and in the wild desert sun  
we drove straight on through the night  
we rode a fever out of Boston  
dreamed of California nights_

_… you know the summer always brought it  
that wild and reckless breeze  
and in the backseat we’re just trying to find some room for our knees  
and in the backseat we’re just trying to find some room to breathe_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [My Enemies Are All Too Familiar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/491457) by [liseuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liseuse/pseuds/liseuse)




End file.
